Exploring The Redevelopment Of College English Coursebook Based On Needs Analysis: An Action Research

It can not be denied that coursebooks, the main carrier of knowledge and one of the most classical and significant teaching resources, are widely regarded as an eternal topic being talked about in teaching and learning activities since the advent of education. The development of coursebooks, therefore, is of great importance. But with the rapid development and update of different knowledge and teaching ideas, the function and status of teaching material have been changed correspondingly. In the past, both teachers and students had showed their absolute worship to and dependence on the teaching material. And now coursebooks are just one of various tools or means to impart knowledge to learners. Obviously, the traditional teaching philosophy of “teaching the coursebook” has been replaced by a new one, namely “teaching with the coursebook”. The new round of education curriculum reform empowered teachers to redevelop teaching materials and advocated that a teacher should use coursebooks creatively and get rid of blind worship of the coursebook and total reliance on it in practical dynamic teaching situation, so as to make coursebook much more appropriate to meet students’ learning needs. Making use of and redeveloping of teaching materials creatively not only is extremely helpful for students but also become an indispensable part of teacher’s professional development.There have been many researchers who had already discussed on “coursebook redevelopment” from theoretical point of view. This writer has two years’ teaching experience, teaching art-major and sport-major students(two classes, 104 in total) and found these students belong to a special language learning group. These students cannot follow the teachers and many of them show no interest in English language learning. One big reason accounting for this phenomenon may be that students “cannot understand ” teaching content, which could be attributed to the difficulty of textbook of Innovation College English in use.On the basis of these problems and author’s hypothesis, this study makes a combination of theoretical studies and practical teaching through an action research to attempt to mainly explore these three questions: 1) What are the learners’ needs concerning coursebook redevelopment? 2) What kinds of techniques are involved in the coursebook redevelopment? 3)What impact does coursebook redevelopment have on students’ affective factors such as interest, confidence, motivation and anxiety? In this study, both qualitative study and quantitative research were used to get information by means of questionnaires, face-to-face and online interviews, and text analysis. The final results were ensured to be as objective as possible.The result of this research shows that the redevelopment of college coursebooks is able to largely improve art-major and sport-major students’ interests and decrease their anxiety in English learning; Students want their oral English ability to be improved most and they believe that a welcome teacher should be good at communicating with students and be capable of making flexible use of various teaching methods; There have been many techniques involving in coursebook redevelopment, among which, adding, omission, replacement, rewriting, and reordering are frequently used. It is believed that only when teachers insisting on appropriate teaching beliefs, exploring updated teaching ideas and understanding students’ need and putting it into practice, could teaching become a meaningful process in which both teachers and students can find their own pleasure.