An Evaluation On Listening And Speaking Sections Of New Standard English For English 1-5

Listening and speaking teaching have been neglected for a long time, even if listening and speaking have been regarded as important skills by the National English Curriculum Standards(NECS), and as important parts of the college entrance examination. The reasons are varied. Lacking of teaching facilities, limited classroom hours, and unfamiliar with the topics in the textbooks, all these can contribute to the primitive conditions of listening and speaking. The behind reasons can be concluded from two perspectives, lack of listening and speaking training and improper use of textbooks. In recent years, researchers mainly focus on the whole evaluation of the textbook, or from the perspective of grammar or vocabulary. Seldom have they drawn attention to the evaluation on listening and speaking sections of the textbook. Moreover, even if the evaluation is about the listening and speaking, the research targets are the college students. Little work has been done to the field about the evaluation on listening and speaking sections of textbooks for senior high school students.At the beginning of the thesis, the current problems in listening and speaking teaching. and the problems in textbook use are elaborated carefully. Then, by reviewing the related studies on listening and speaking skills, and the researches about textbook evaluation, a framework of textbook evaluation model for the present study is proposed. An internal evaluation of the listening and speaking sections of New Standard English(NSE) published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press is followed to provide a detailed examination based on the framework. Moreover, the data collected from questionnaires for students and teachers, and the interview for teachers is analyzed as the external evaluation of the textbooks. The ultimate goal of the study is to raise teachers'awareness of promoting students listening and speaking skills training, and to make full use of the textbooks with certain adaptation.150 senior one students in five classes in charge of different English teachers in Nankai Middle School are chosen to participate in this study. And five English teachers are invited to do the interview to avoid subjectivity and partiality. The questionnaire is a revised one based on the questionnaire proposed by Grant and the checklists for listening and speaking proposed by Cunningsworth. In order to reach a more satisfactory and scientific result, the interview for teachers is adopted to collect the data, aiming at supplying some supplementary data for questionnaires and gaining more insights from teachers" perspective. Both internal and external evaluation are to find out to what extent the textbooks fit the learners" requirements for listening and speaking, and whether the textbooks facilitate tackling the problems and promote learning. The findings prove that New Standard English can meet the requirements of listening and speaking proposed by the National English Curriculum Standards, and is equivalent to learners" language proficiency. However, it also needs to be adopted, for students ask for more interesting topics closely related to their real-life, and various activities with enough chance to practice.Although the present study is constrained by some limitations, such as the finite resource, and limited time, it may provide some useful suggestions for better use of the textbook to promote learners'listening and speaking development. Hopefully, it may also shed lights on the future study on compiling the textbook concerning with the listening and speaking sections.