A Study On Vocabulary Design In NSE For Senior High School

This paper reports a study of New Standard English (NSE) published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in 2004, aiming to find out the features of vocabulary design of NSE, especially the layout and presentation of the new words, the underlying thought of its vocabulary design and its vocabulary exercises.Firstly, the writer reviewed the theories of coursebook evaluation as well as researches on vocabulary design. Then a descriptive analysis based on that was adopted to analyze the coursebooks. During the first stage, statistic information was collected by analyzing the coursebook. Then, at the second stage, a survey was made among teachers and students by employing a questionnaire. The data was analyzed according to certain criteria.After analyzing, the writer found out the following features of NSE:the arrangement of new words is reasonable; the vocabulary design is mainly based on topics and contexts; there are varieties of vocabulary learning activities and vocabulary exercises, which are helpful to the students'English learning; but there are still places needed to improve:non-syllabus words are not indicated in the wordlist; not all the target words are practiced or recycled; there are less text-related exercises in the vocabulary exercises in the workbook.Subsequent to the findings, the writer pointed out the strengths and weaknesses of NSE on vocabulary design.It should be noted that the analysis of vocabulary design in coursebooks is still at an initial stage, so the methodology in this thesis remains to be improved in future research.