A Study Of Instrumental Texts In Senior High School English Textbook Based On Corpus

English textbooks have been a focus and an important item in the foreign language teaching and research for many years. The English textbooks which are not only the teacher’s main tool for teaching but also the very direct reflection of the curriculum content and aims, play an important and irreplaceable role during the process of the English teaching and learning. Therefore, the importance and significance of the research on the analysis and evaluation of the English textbooks goes without saying. Nowadays, with the development of the information networking, it has been a popular trend to make the research on the English teaching and learning with the help of the corpus. As an important part of the textbooks, the instrumental texts play an important role in organizing the teaching content and the teaching activities, also in facilitating the communication of the teacher, students and textbooks. Therefore, it is of great theoretical and practical significance to do the study on the instrumental texts of the textbooks.This thesis analyzes the three sets of frequently-used English textbooks in senior high schools in Chongqing area from the following five main aspects: the language knowledge(phonetic knowledge), the language skills(spoken English), the learning strategy and learning model, the relationship between the textbook and students, and the context setting in the textbook. The three sets of English textbook are respectively published by the PEP, FLTRP and Chongqing University Press(CQUP). The main goals are to find: 1. What differences are there in the language knowledge and language skills among the three sets of English textbooks? 2. Are there some differences in the the instructional activities of high-level thinking among the three sets of textbooks? What differences are there in the context setting-up among the three sets of textbooks? 3. What differences are there in the relationship between textbooks and students? 4. What advantages and disadvantages are among the three sets of English textbook, and how instructors should make best use of the instrumental texts in the textbooks? Accordingly, two hypotheses have been put forward: 1. The instrumental texts can reflect the teaching notions in the New Curriculum Standard; 2. The comprehensive understanding and proper use of the instrumental texts can help improve the teaching effectiveness.Based on the tiny corpus of instrumental texts, this thesis is to analyze the textbooks with the use of Bloom’s educational target classification theory, and standards set in the New Curriculum Standard. From each of the five aspects(language knowledge, language skills, learning strategies and learning model, context setting and the relationship between students and textbooks), this thesis analyzes the instrumental texts of the three textbooks respectively with the help of the corpus retrieval tools and the method of quantitative analysis, to get the data and result.The findings of this research are: 1. the two hypotheses are correct;2.the PEP English textbook reflects the goals and standards of the New Curriculum Standard better and more comprehensively; 3. There is much work to do to make an improvement in the context setting-up in the FLTRP English textbook; 4. Compared with the other two sets of the textbooks, the textbooks published by the Chongqing University Press need improvement in many aspects. And the instructor needs to make some adjustments and try to make best use of the instrumental texts of the English textbook.