| Textbooks play an important role in guiding teacher's lesson design and delivery,providing students with suitable support to learn linguistic knowledge.Reading texts in textbooks of junior English for China(JEFC)consist of different kinds of genres,through which students could construct the system of knowledge and apply it to achieve their communicative purposes.Genre-based textbook analysis has yielded good results,but most researches focused on higher education and English for Specific Purpose(ESP)and tend to analyze linguistic features.The analysis of the genres in junior high school English textbooks could not only open up a new perspective for English teaching,but also expand the data of educational genre analysisThis study applied the genre theory from the tradition of Sydney School to analyze the types,communicative purposes,schematic structures,and linguistic features of genres in junior high English textbooks,and investigate the distribution of genre with reference to the English Curriculum Standard of the 2011 edition(ECS(2011)).The corpus of this study was reading texts from People's Education Press(PEP)'s new version---Go for it.!(2012),and the analysis was assisted with the manual annotation of the UAM Corpus Tool 3.0 for Mac to answer the following three questions1.What kind of genres do the JEFC textbooks include?2.What are the characteristics of the genre distribution in JEFC textbooks in different grades?Do they match the requirements in ECS(2011)?3.What are the communicative purposes,schematic structures,and linguistic features of genres in the JEFC textbooks?The study finds:First of all,Go for it!(2012)for junior high school provide a wide range of genres,including seven genre families:stories,histories,reports,explanations,arguments,responses,and mixed texts.There are altogether 21 sub-categories and the most frequent one is recount.Second,the distribution of genres in Go for it!(2012)shows different focuses at different grades.The textbooks in Grade Seven tend to be descriptive and practical.The first half of Grade Seven focuses on reports while the second half focuses more on stories.Then genres in Eighth Grade textbooks are relatively complete.The first half of Grade Eight focuses more on arguments while the second half focuses more on stories,especially narratives.Genres in Grade Nine still focus the story genre and the majority is recount.The genre distribution of Go for it!(2012)largely conforms to the related requirements of ECS(2011)and the cognitive development of students as it embodies the principle of‘step by step',but there are still drawbacks.Besides,the distribution of genres in junior English textbooks also shows an iterative and progressive pattern in presenting genres,especially stories and arguments which occur repeatedly and getting harder.Lastly,the schematic structures of the genre in Go for it!(2012)meet the typical settings of Sydney School to a large extent.Some of them show varieties of constructing stage but a small part of them deviate dramatically from the canonical structures.Moreover,each genre family has its specific linguistic featuresThese findings have beneficial implications for the English teaching and textbooks design in junior high schools.It suggests that teachers might be required to provide additional supports to make the reading materials in textbooks more substantial and accessible to students.And the genre-based pedagogy could be applied to English instruction.This study also suggests the textbook authors arrange more appropriate coverage of genres in Grade Nine and allow students to be exposed to more varied genres However,there are some limitations in the study due to the limited time and energy.The corpus is just one version of junior high English textbooks that is not enough to summarize the genre distributions and features of all versions of junior high English textbooks.Also,the application of SFL genre theory is not deep enough to discover more detailed linguistic features in genres. |
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