An Analysis And Evaluation Of PEP New Senior English For China

Foreign language teaching materials play a key role in reforming foreignlanguage teaching. Choosing and using the suitable coursebook is one of theimportant factors to complete the teaching contents and achieve the teachinggoals. With the reform of courses on elementary education coming intopractice and the development of foreign language teaching, more and moreforeign language teaching coursebooks have appeared in the market. In thatcase, it is very significant to evaluate these textbooks. The new Senior Englishfor China (Revised SEFC) is one of these textbooks. This set was successfullyrevised by People s Education Press and began to be applied all over thecountry from the autumn semester of2007and the whole set was completedin2010. Being a coursebook newly published and widely used, timelyevaluation of SEFC is in need since it can provide some feedback that may behelpful for its revision and implementation.In order to investigate whether this set of new textbooks reflect thephilosophies advocated in the NECS and whether they are suitable to differentlevels teachers and students in this area, the study has been designed andimplemented. The thesis applies both internal and external evaluation. First, itanalyzes the textbooks from the perspective of overall language ability,including language knowledge, language skills, learning strategies, culturalawareness and affect.Then, through the questionnaires survey to the teachersand students in Chifeng, the author has found out the current situation of theusage of this material in those schools. The current usage situation includesteachers’ and students’ overall views about the material and their views abouteach module in the material. students’ and teachers’ views about how thismaterial can develop students’ abilities, and so on. The following are themajor findings emerged from the study: generally speaking, NSEFC is in fullagreement with the NECS requirements; topics in NSEFC’ are rich, so they are very attractive to students; the difficulty level of NSEFC’ is appropriate,except for the listening part; students’ attitudes towards activities in generallyneutral and they think these activities can develop their language skills;NSEFC’ pays attention to cultivate students’ learning strategies; NSEFCincreases students’ cross-cultural awareness, however, the distribution ofcultural knowledge needs to be balanced; NSEFC helps students set upcorrect views and values towards life through learning materials. In general,this set of new textbooks match to the teaching level and the exams inChifeng area.Finally, several suggestions have been proposed for teachers. Forteachers, they should carefully study the NECS which provides the guidingprinciples of textbooks compilation. Only by doing this can they betterimplement the philosophies in their practical teaching. Besides, they need toadapt the textbooks flexibly according to practical situations. Teachers cansupply, delete, replace, expand or reorder the contents of the textbooks so asto improve teaching effects.