| Textbooks are important components of the English curriculum practice. Choosing and using the suitable textbooks is one of the vital factors to complete the teaching tasks and achieve the teaching goals. Since the new material policy "One Standard. Multiple Versions of Textbook" exists as an alternative to the old one, English textbooks have been developing at an amazing speed with the new curriculum reform and under the guidance of the National English Curriculum Standards (NECS). Various teaching materials make the evaluation of teaching materials very important.In September.2003. Fun with English for junior middle schools by Yilin Press has been officially used as the English textbooks for junior middle schools in Jiangsu Province, schools and teachers are confronted with great pressure posed by the frequent shift of materials to regulate and accommodate oneself to the new circumstances. The aim of this study is to judge whether they meet the requirements of the NECS as well as the demands of both teachers and students in Yangzhou city through making an objective and scientific evaluation of the textbooks in a systematical way.This study focuses on the six compulsory textbooks and adopted an internal evaluation and an external evaluation proposed by Cheng Xiaotang. Firstly, the author analyzes the textbooks from the perspective of overall language ability provided by the NECS to get the information to what extent the textbooks meet the requirements of the NECS. Secondly, in order to make the study more objective and more persuasive, the survey has been carried out among teachers and students to discover the textbooks users’attitudes towards Fun with English. The two questionnaires are designed by referring to Gao Lingbiao’s assessment of English textbooks and Grant’s checklist to investigate the in-use situation of textbooks. The author distributes33questionnaires to teachers and220questionnaires to Grade Three students in two junior middle schools of two different levels:a key middle school in the city and a non-key middle school in the city.Through the internal and external evaluation, the author draws the following conclusions:1) Fun with English for junior middle schools coincides with the requirements of the NECS basically; teachers and students in Yangzhou city are basically satisfied with the textbooks; the textbooks keep pace with the times but the listening and speaking topics cannot interest students; the textbooks are good for the cultivation of students" thoughts and culture awareness; the textbooks reflect the students’cognitive development and their psychological characteristics as a whole; the school facilities and teaching level in Yangzhou city satisfy the teaching and learning needs of the textbooks basically.2) Compilers design activities on the basis of the task-teaching methods, which are closely connected with the practical use. However, the drills concerning listening and speaking can not help the improvement of students’ language skills effectively because the difficult of relevant activities is not high enough. Grammar points are designed in some real-life contexts so as to enable students to understand them in a comfortable and pleasant way but the low recurrence of knowledge points makes students’ fundamental knowledge of grammar not solid enough.3) Such aims as affect and attitude, culture knowledge and learning strategies are presented in both implicit and explicit ways. Learning strategies directly presented in the textbooks could not satisfy the learning needs of students in junior middle schools and their limited cognitive ability makes it hard to find the learning strategies indirectly presented in the textbooks.Finally, several suggestions have been proposed for teachers and compilers. For teachers, they should carefully study the NECS and make the most of the textbooks flexibly and creatively. For compilers, they need to focus on the students’interests through adding more contents which are close to students’ daily life. Besides, they should pay attention to language knowledge points recycling and incorporate more learning strategies into the textbooks so as to meet students’ learning needs. Furthermore, they should balance the distribution of knowledge points of culture and work harder on the design of the drills in the textbooks in order to make the textbooks better suitable for the physical, psychological and cognitive characteristics of the teenagers of junior middle schools, which enables students to master a foreign language and language learning skills more effectively and efficiently.The limitations of the study are as follows:1) the survey is done only in the two schools in Yangzhou city. For a more comprehensive evaluation, more teachers and students need to be involved. With the limited energy, time and resources of the author, the compilers and experts in this field are not involved:2) this study does not consider these factors in detail such as the gender, age, attitude, and personality of the students which actually influence the evaluation of the textbooks.There are five parts in the thesis:1) an introduction to the study:2) the related theories of textbooks and textbooks evaluation;3) the textual analysis of the textbooks under the guideline of the National English Curriculum Standards:4) the evaluation of Fun with English based on the data analysis:5) the conclusion of the present study. |
