A Study On The Topic And Genre Of College Reading Materials

English coursebooks as the main resource of input knowledge especially in the classroom,and it’s been playing an essential role in English teaching classes. And college students’ average English level is capable of dealing with the basic English articles or daily conversations. Thus, the reading materials in English coursebooks are one of the key factors to motivate college students to learn English. The topic and genre are two main roles in reading materials, with the topic representing the main idea and the genre presenting the contents. Many English reading coursebooks can be found in the market, and some of them are of good quality and some are not. Therefore, more and more coursebooks were analyzed and evaluated by teachers and scholars. However, there are only few studies and evaluations that are focused on the topic and genre, which leads to the motivation of conducting this study.This study aims to provide both students and teachers with a clearer view and better understanding of reading materials from the angle of topics and genres, and it’s based on New Horizon College English: Writing and Reading(Second Edition), which is a set of widely used coursebooks among universities. Topics and genres are two essential factors of reading materials, because the topic is a reflection of the category and the genre is a way to present the content. And both of quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in analysis of the topic and genre. The result shows that the topics and genres were deliberately chosen and arranged in NHCE: Writing and Reading, and they can meet most of the learners’ needs from both language content and communicative abilities. Nevertheless, there are still some space for the improvement of the topics and genres.Chapter one is introduction to the background, the purpose and the significance of this study. Chapter two helps us to understand how the study works by introducing some basic relevant theories and studies, such as materials evaluation and the analysis of topics and genres. Chapter three is the methodology, applied in this study. Chapter four is the analysis of topics and genres in the reading coursebooks of NHCE, in this chapter all the topics and genres of the coursebooks were extracted and rearranged in certain ways and categories and then analyzed them with the theories and methods that mentioned before. The last chapter is the major findings of the study, and the result shows that: 1. The coverage of the topics is not very optimal for college English learning, though the contents are good of quality; 2. Topics are gradated in a cyclic way, which is a good method to enhance the knowledge that students have learnt before; 3. The relationship between topics and genres is inter-correspondent, indicating that although there are only four genres presented in the coursebooks, they are reflected on many different topics from different angles.