New Concepts Of New Concept English

As is known to all, coursebooks play an important role in English teaching and learning, for it is not only the embodiment of the syllabus but also the basis for teachers to organize their teaching activity. Therefore, the quality of coursebooks is a decisive factor affecting English teaching and learning. That's why the objective evaluation of a textbook is quite significant and now receiving more and more attention.New Concept English (NCE) is a very popular English language learning coursebook. From 1960's to now, almost half century, it is still people's favorite. In China, it is so widely used that from the kindergartens, primary schools, middle schools, to colleges and universities. As NCE has such popularity and effectiveness, we can find out that its accuracy and clear point can not be neglected.Materials play an important role in curriculum, since they have much to do with content and form of teaching and learning. As the core of language curriculum, teaching materials should reflect the development of science and technology, the latest theoretical and practical researches of language teaching. The thesis attempts to conduct a systematic and comprehensive analysis and evaluation of NCE based on the concerned evaluation theories and statistics. The author initially reviews some relevant theoretical principles, linguistic theories, language learning theories and syllabus theories for material evaluation and development respectively. Obtaining much inspiration from ELT (English language teaching) material evaluation theories, the author analyzes the coursebook from the aspects of its package, compiler's claims, and the features of NCE.By evaluation and analysis, the author finds out that the reason why NCE is so popular, which can be honored as a model of the other English coursebooks, is that it has its own advantages. 1) NCE is the achievement of structuralist linguistics and cognitive linguistics, so we label NCE with"structural-situational". 2) NCE is scientific. Based on the traditional grammar-translation approach, NCE initiates audio-lingual method. 3) NCE is systematic. Whether among the four volumes, or among the units, or among the lessons, they all connect with each other well, and they obey gradual and grading principles, which is from preliminary level to advanced level with cycles. 4) NCE is completeness. The coursebook is used for a long time, and by various learners. It's good for teachers to teach, and for students to learn. Furthermore, NCE can help students learn by themselves. 5) NCE obeys text-centered principles. The texts in NCE are new and interesting for students. Meanwhile, the language points including vocabulary and grammar are plentiful. In spite of these advantages, by contrasts and comparisons between the original edition NCE and the new edition one, the author makes some different views and puts forward some suggestions on texts, titles, vocabulary, translation and other items.The significance of the thesis is to draw attention to the language materials evaluation work, equip English teachers with material evaluation methods, and to shed light on the change of teaching/learning model in the classroom. It must be pointed out that it is the new concept of the New Concept English that can help establish the technology of coursebook writing or compiling for which we can coin a new term—"Coursebookology".