Evaluation Of Project English Under The National English Curriculum Standards (2011)

The development of a good set of English textbooks requires multiple interrelated aspects, among which textbooks evaluation is essential. While with the implementation of new curriculum, a common set of textbooks for the country has been broken. Facing the sudden emergence of so many textbooks, how their qualities are on earth? What issues they are in use and how to improve? How do we evaluate and select appropriate local school textbooks? To answer those questions, it is urgent to evaluate textbooks scientifically and objectively. On the one hand, through evaluation the executive branch can ensure adequate investment to middle school textbooks; on the other hand, the local schools can select suitable textbooks. Of course, the compilers can get feedback through evaluation and improve the quality of textbooks.According to the National English Curriculum Standards2011(NECS in the whole thesis). Project English2012version (PE2012) was revised by Beijing Ren’ ai Institute of Education based on the original materials, which has been reviewed and passed by all in2013. Currently, textbooks of Grade7have begun to be used for the second year and PE2012is one of the two widely used English textbooks in junior high schools in Chongqing. Then, through investigation, the author found that so far no evaluation of its suitability has been done in Chongqing. Therefore, this thesis chose textbooks for Grade7as the main research objects to evaluate both internally and externally. It aimed to find out the extent to which the textbooks embody their advocated compiling concepts, the extent to meet the requirements of the NECS (2011), the suitability of teachers and students in Chongqing, and the merits and demerits of the textbooks in-use. Then, recommendations for teachers, students, compilers and local educational administrative departments are provided.The thesis began to describe the background, purposes, and significance of the present study, then reviewed some related theoretical bases for textbooks compilation and evaluation. After that, a working criterion was proposed. To make the research more scientific and objective, the present study combined qualitative research method with quantitative research method. Firstly, the author used text analysis method to evaluate PE2012internally, to explore the extent that it complied with the compiling concepts and the requirements of the NECS in terms of the compilation guidelines and principles, teaching aims and approaches, arrangements of teaching contents, and the five aspects of overall language ability. Then, the author adopted questionnaire, interview, and classroom observation to make an external evaluation of the textbooks’practical using situation in Chongqing. Finally, the data and information collected were dealt and presented by figures and tables through Excel.Through evaluation, it can be found that PE2012meets the requirements of the NECS. Meanwhile, it adopts multi-dimensional syllabus, takes eclectic views of language and language learning, and changes the concepts of the NECS into operable activities, thus it has "guidance on teaching and learning". Moreover, PE2012has many distinctive features. It has extensive text themes, rich genres and diverse activities; achieves the overall design of pronunciation teaching while emphasizes stage focus, focusing on training of student’s spelling ability; emphasizes unification of language knowledge with language skills; and has fresh beautiful layout, proper graphics and so on. However, teachers and students investigated also reflect there exist some problems, such as the interest of materials is not enough, listening materials are a little difficult for students, the selection of materials is not close enough to students (especially rural students) in real life, vocabulary is too large, it is lack of reiteration of key language knowledge, and the cover is easy to fall off, etc.On this basis, recommendations for teachers, students, compilers and local educational administrative departments are provided. Teachers should enhance their professional development constantly, study the NECS carefully, understand new textbooks and teaching reference thoroughly, increase complex integration of language skills properly, provide guidance for students in learning strategies elaborately in teaching and expand teaching resources beyond textbooks. In learning, students should learn the importance of Grammar&Function and Project, apply various learning strategies and methods advocated by the textbooks to optimize learning and develop good learning habits, and enrich extracurricular English learning activities to increase learning interest more effectively. While textbook compilers should pay more attention to the selection of interesting materials, optimize teaching contents and arrangements, reduce difficulty appropriately, and improve the printing quality to facilitate students to save. In addition, the author suggests that the local educational administrative departments should improve enforcement of the implementation of the new textbooks, provide a strong fund guarantee for the implementation of the new textbooks, as well as offer more opportunities for teacher training, education and so on.Of course, there are some inadequacies in this thesis. Due to objective reasons, the study objects may not be enough. Therefore, in order to make the results more representative, future researches could further expand the research objects and research subjects. Besides, more diverse research instruments will make research results more objective and credible.