Evaluation Of Business English Writing Coursebooks Based On McDonough & Shaw's Evaluation Theory

Coursebooks of Business English (BE) writing in China has gained a rapid development nowadays, which is reflected in their large quantity and variety. However, there have been few domestic scholars making research specifically on these coursebooks, which does not conform to the booming growth of Chinese BE teaching and development of BE coursebooks. Therefore, this thesis believes that it is of practical significance to investigate whether these existing coursebooks can meet the needs of learners.Taking Jo McDonough & Christopher Shaw'evaluation theory as theoretical basis, with the help of Hutchinson & Waters'framework of needs analysis, this thesis evaluated 10 BE writing coursebooks for undergraduates to check whether the domestic coursebooks of this kind can satisfy their learners. This study related coursebook evaluation to needs analysis and put forward three questions:1. What are the learning needs and target needs of BE writing learners?2. What is the status quo of domestic BE writing coursebooks for undergraduates in terms of external, internal and overall evaluation? To what extent do the existing BE writing coursebooks match learners'needs?3. What are the major strengths and problems of BE writing coursebooks in China? What are the possible reasons for the problems?This study collected research data through questionnaires and interviews. Questionnaires were handed out to 399 BE writing learners and 62 in-service BE employees in companies to investigate their learning needs and target needs respectively; interviews were done with 10 BE writing teachers to investigate their opinions and suggestions on coursebooks during their teaching activities. Through data analysis and evaluation on the target coursebooks, this thesis got results and findings as follows:First, learners'learning needs are to learn BE writing techniques and principles to realize communicative purposes with comprehensive business skills, and their target needs are to practice BE writing skills to communicate with overseas clients in business contexts.Second, in terms of external evaluation, the status quo of BE writing coursebooks couldn't fully satisfy the needs of learners, in particular, their vocabulary lists and teaching videos had to be improved; in terms of internal evaluation, these coursebooks showed more strengths than problems, their prominent problem being the deficiency in compilation theory; in the overall evaluation, these coursebooks got high scores of evaluation, indicating that current domestic BE writing coursebooks can meet the needs of learners at large.Third, the strengths of domestic BE writing coursebooks were mainly reflected in the arrangement of contents and exercises. Their contents were featured by their pertinency and practicability, some contents like business correspondences were maturely exploited; their exercises were improved in terms of authenticity to bear obvious communicative and practical characteristics. The problems existed in three aspects: the severe overlap of similar contents, common deficiency of compilation theory, insufficient attention to texts authenticity. Major reasons for these problems included the lack of needs analysis in coursebook writing, writers'unfamiliarity with relevant theories in coursebook development, and the difficulty in collecting and applying authentic texts.Based on the above study, several implications are brought out, including exploring stereoscopic coursebooks, compiling coursebooks on the basis of needs analysis, and so on. It is hoped that this study is of some value for future development of BE writing coursebooks.