| As one of the necessary reference materials for education,the textbook has been the subject of many classic studies in the educational field.With the advancement of educational reform,educational practitioners and researchers are placing more and more emphasis on developing student-centered instruction.Meanwhile,how to help students to improve their learning abilities,how to develop students’ core competence following their language proficiency,are the hot topics of discussion in the field of education research and language teaching.So,how textbooks,as key support materials,can be best employed to help students to build their knowledge is the major concern in this study.Based on Bernstein’s Knowledge Structure Theory,Maton(2000,2004,2007,2009)proposed the Legitimation Code Theory(LCT)with its five legitimated methods:Autonomy,Density,Specialization,Temporality,and Semantics.With these five dimensions,Maton provides a new way of helping students in their cumulative knowledge building.The LCT demonstrates an effective way to study the knowledge construction,i.e.to analyze the method of knowledge building under the guidance of the legitimated methods,and then define its mode.The “knowledge construction”,or “knowledge building” is a process that indicates how students will learn the knowledge,how they can transfer the complicated knowledge to their understanding as well as how they may get success through learning the specific knowledge.Knowledge building can be easily ignored because of its abstraction.However,the LCT can concrete such a process through its legitimated methods.With the help of LCT,learners will get a clear direction of their needs of knowledge construction.The key notions concerned in this research are the specialization code and the semantic code,which all have a close relationship with language teaching and learning.With the help of the LCT,this project will conduct a comparative analysis between Go For It,the English textbook series widely used in Chinese junior middle schools,and THINK,the English textbook series published by Cambridge University Press for junior high school students.Through the analysis,the study expects to provide some worthwhile suggestions for more effective use of English textbooks in the middle school classroom in China.The research questions of this study are threefold:(1)How are specialization and semantic codes distributed in Go For it and THINK textbooks?(2)What impacts do such distribution patterns of codes have on the construction of knowledge differently from the perspective of specialization codes,and how do such distribution patterns of codes affect the construction of knowledge differently from the perspective of semantic codes?(3)How does such knowledge construction influence English teaching in Chinese junior middle schools?Through the comparative analysis of two sets of English textbooks,the following results have been revealed:1.From the perspective of the specialization code,the leading code in the textbook Go For It is the knowledge code,which focuses on the epistemic relation and the usage of specific knowledge skills.The success of students’ learning under the knowledge code depends on the obtaining of the special knowledge while neglecting learners themselves.In contrast,the THINK series owns the elite code which puts equal importance on the epistemic relation and the social relation,therefore the evaluation of a successful learner in the THINK series is based on both the grasp of the knowledge as well as being a good knower to express his or her ideas.2.From the perspective of the semantic gravity,both two sets of English textbooks have a strong semantic gravity in their reading exercises,which leads to a lacking of training with the conclusion and the generation.Compared with THINK,the semantic gravity is even stronger in Go For It.A strong semantic gravity in exercises indicates a preference for choosing questions that can be answered with the information directly from the passage itself.That is,students’ job is to simply find the message in the materials without too much process of thinking and rethinking,which is against the training of students’ abilities in abstraction and generation.3.Concerning the semantic density which reflects the degree of the complexity in knowledge,the chosen words in both two textbooks tend to have a weaker semantic density,which is the result of considering the development of middle school students’ cognitive levels.While there are still words with strong semantic density in the given context,which represent the core concepts that needed to unpack.Meanwhile,with the improvement of the difficulty of the materials,the semantic density becomes stronger in both two textbooks,at the same time,the semantic density is a bit stronger in THINK than that in Go For It.Thus,the research suggests that teachers should do adjustment accordingly when using the textbook Go For It in the classroom.First of all,to strengthen the usage of the knower code,teachers can add more activities with group work and leave more space for students to think and share their ideas on what they learned,thus improving students’ abilities on the self-study and the cooperation study.Besides,the classroom should also add related exercises with the conclusion and the generalization beyond the passage to weaken the semantic gravity which is too strong in the exercises of the textbooks,so to develop students’ competence on abstract thinking.Moreover,for those words with a strong semantic density also the key concept words in the contexts,teachers should explain them completely with simple words,use lively examples to help students to understand.Meanwhile,during the class,there should be enough time for students to absorb that complicated knowledge,thus encouraging them to generate their ideas so as to consolidate their knowledge construction.The Legitimation Code Theory is a creative and practical theory for the education research field.It will have a more extensive stage in educational studies in our country.It is worthwhile for the advanced discussion to pay more attention to its application in the more integrated circumstance in classroom teaching and textbook usage. |
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