A Theme Study Of The Integrated English Textbooks For English Teacher Education In China

English is a compulsory course from basic education to higher education inChina. In recent decades, the discussion of English teachers’ knowledge has widelyextended among researchers and educators since English language competence isbecoming increasingly important. The learning methods and teacher’s quality areboth essential in foreign language acquisition. Pre-service teacher education is acrucial period in teacher’s professional development. Compared with othercompulsory courses, the learning of the Integrated English Course takes up thelargest amount of time, so that it should deserve much more attention.By selecting fifteen sets of integrated English textbooks published after thefounding of the P. R. China, the thesis aims to evaluate all themes of these textbooksfrom the perspective of English teachers’ knowledge for getting the themedistribution of all texts through quantitative analysis. Meanwhile, the author alsocarries out the investigation of questionnaires and interviews among senior studentsmajoring in English teaching, frontline teachers in high school, and textbookcompiling experts for their evaluation and ideas on textbook compilation for Englishlanguage teaching majors. According to evaluation and result analysis, this researchconcludes three findings:1) the Integrated English textbooks evaluated in this thesiscontain rich encyclopedic knowledge, which basically meets students’ needs of thecommon knowledge for being English teachers.2) For all the analyzed course books,the core knowledge of English teachers is insufficient, such as knowledge of making ateaching plan, knowledge of class management, knowledge of course evaluation, andother categories of knowledge for accumulating English teaching competence.3)Knowledge and information contained in the selected texts are somewhatout-of-date, which cannot reflect up to date achievements and perspectives.Based on the findings, the author puts forward the following suggestions on thefuture integrated English textbook compilation for ELT majors:1) Carry out needsanalysis before textbook compilation.2) Add more texts about English pedagogicalcontent knowledge.3) The reading texts should cultivate the habit of self-learning and self-reflection.4) The reading texts should aim at nurturing the pre-serviceteachers’ professional ethics and beliefs, in the aspects of respecting students,self-sacrifice and the pursuit of self-realization.Focusing on the four suggestions, the author constructs a framework forcompiling texts of the integrated English textbook. The framework includes the ideasof compilation, the arrangement of knowledge and different texts, as well asreasonable treatment of new vocabularies. The author believes that since the coursebook is compiled for English majors of normal universities, the inside texts should notonly pass on common knowledge but also carry the specific teacher knowledge, suchas pedagogical content knowledge, and general pedagogical and psychologicalknowledge, etc. In detail, the considerations of theme and content of every text,distribution of key knowledge, levels of difficulty, and the learning of newvocabularies should not be overlooked.