Interdisciplinary Analysis Of High School English Textbooks

According to Ordinary High School English Curriculum Standard, it should be helpfulto wide students’ horizon and mind when compiling the English teaching material, toconnect the students’ life with the content of the textbook, and to provide the fresh languagematerials. So it is very significant for the integrated development to take theinterdisciplinarity on textbook, which is an important portion in high school Englishteaching, into consideration. We should also arouse the teachers’ and students’interdisciplinary awareness, popularize the interdisciplinary English teaching, so that theachievement of the English teaching reform, the improvement of English teaching quality,the development in an all-around way on students would bloom together. Till now, however,we are short of the interdisciplinary research about high school English textbook. In thismatter, the author takes the textbooks of Senior English for China (compulsory part) fromPeople’s Education Press (PEP) and Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press(FLTRP) as an example to analyze and compare their interdisciplinarity with the tools ofquantitative analysis, qualitative analysis and the literature research.The word interdisciplinarity firstly appeared in America in1920s. It means to study anorganizational unit that involves two or more academic disciplines as an educational orscientific research by breaking down the barriers between them. As an essential carrier ofeducation and scientific activity, the interdisciplinarity on textbook can efficiently enhancethe concordance of different knowledge and the cross-course teaching methods under thepremise of satisfy stucents’ self-interest development. In this thesis, from theinterdisciplinary angle combined with quantitative and qualitative analysis, the contrastiveanalysis between the Senior English for China (required module1-5) from People’sEducation Press and the High school English Textbook (required module1-5) from ForeignLanguage Teaching and Research Press has been made to draw a conclusion: the teachingmaterial from PEP did a better job on thematic unit subject distribution and textbook content subject distribution than the one form FLTRP.To understand and analyze the current situation of interdisciplinary teaching, the authormade a questionnaire survey to30high school English teachers who are using textbooksfrom PEP and another30using the one form FLTRP. It shows that most teachers are highlyinterested in the interdisciplinary method, but know it little; most teachers are satisfied withthe existed interdisciplinary contents in the current textbooks but, unfortunately, they havefew times to explain it to students. Moreover, some of the teachers believe that high schoolEnglish teachers should arm themselves with corresponding interdisciplinary professions,while they fail to cultivate students’ interdisciplinary awareness.According to the comparison between those textbooks from different presses, and theanalysis of the survey, the author had made some suggestions and requirements aboutEnglish teachers, students, teaching materials and English exams at the end of this thesis,hoping to boost the reform of interdisciplinary teaching system, optimize the high schoolEnglish teaching quality and facilitate students a round self-development.