An Evaluation On Reading Materials In Senior High School English Textbooks New Standard English (2019)

English textbooks play a vital role in English teaching,providing students with listening,speaking,reading and writing materials.As an indispensable part of English textbooks,reading materials are the primary source for students to learn about different cultures,and essential materials to improve students’ English reading abilities as well.With the promulgation of the English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School(2017),new high school English textbooks have been published.The characteristics of reading materials in the new textbooks and whether or not these materials meet the needs of teaching and learning are worth exploring and studying.Evaluation on reading materials not only helps to enrich the relevant researches,but also provides suggestions for future textbook compilation and reading teaching,which is of theoretical and practical significance.This study selects the reading materials in the textbooks of New Standard English(2019)as the main objects of the evaluation,adopting the evaluation method of combining the internal evaluation with the external evaluation to analyze the reading materials in the new textbooks and the use of the textbooks.The internal evaluation is to make a detailed analysis of the reading materials based on the curriculum standards and the reading analysis framework proposed by Cunningsworth(2002);the external evaluation is to understand the views of teachers and students through questionnaires and interviews.This study attempts to explore two questions: 1)What are the characteristics of the reading materials in the textbooks of New Standard English(2019)? How do they reflect the requirements of the English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School(2017)? 2)What views do the teachers and students hold on the reading materials in the textbooks of New Standard English(2019)?Through the internal evaluation of the textbooks,it is found that the characteristics of the reading materials in the new textbooks are as follows: 1)the genres of the reading materials are rich and diverse;2)the themes are abundant,and closely connected with students’ lives and social development;3)the reading materials are arranged from short to long;4)the grammatical points in the reading materials are rich,and the arrangement of them is reasonable;5)the reading activities are diverse,which are helpful to cultivate students’ reading skills.The reading materials well reflect the requirements of the new curriculum standard in terms of genre,theme,length,grammar and reading activities.However,there are some shortcomings in the compilation of the reading materials,such as unreasonable distribution of the genres and low repetition rate of the grammatical points.The external evaluation of the textbooks shows that most teachers and students are satisfied with the genres,themes and grammatical points of the reading materials in the textbooks of New Standard English(2019),but they believe that the reading materials are long and the reading activities are difficult.In general,the reading materials in the textbooks basically meet the needs of teaching and learning.Based on the research results,some suggestions for textbook compilers and teachers are put forward.In the future revision,textbook compilers should appropriately adjust the genre distribution,the length of the reading materials and the difficulty of the reading activities.In the future teaching,teachers should fully understand the characteristics of the reading materials and their students’ levels,and flexibly adjust the content of the reading materials and the reading activities accordingly.