A Study Of Further Reading Part In The Integrated English Textbooks For English Majors

As an international language,English plays an important role in cultural communication and international conferences as well as other fields.Nowadays,English education begins at kindergarten in almost all areas of China.English education in both compulsory stage and university are laid emphases on and English major education is also paid much attention to.There are many researches on college English textbooks while those on textbooks for English majors are relatively fewer.English majors who love English learning will be practitioners of English related work in future and envoys in cultural communication.Thus cultivation of their linguistic ability and other abilities cannot be casually treated.English skills include listening,speaking,reading,writing and interpreting,among which reading and listening are important means of language input.For the setting of learning English in China,reading is the better way to realize it.English majors should read as much as possible.The more they read,the more likely their language proficiency will be improved with their knowledge reserve broadened and thinking ability promoted.The written material is an indispensable tool to get language input.For English majors,the Integrated English textbook is the most important written material.As the most vital one of all their curricula,Integrated English course takes up the largest proportion of their periods.Besides,the textbook has a unique advantage that other input access does not possess – teachers’ elaboration,which will deepen students’ understanding of knowledge.In the Integrated English textbooks,there are usually two or three texts in each unit or lesson.The first one is the main text,which teachers explain in detail in class,while the second and the third one,namely the further reading part,are only briefly referred to or even ignored.What’s more,many English majors are also indifferent to the further reading part.This common phenomenon not only decreases the effectiveness of the textbooks but also is helpless in achieving the teaching goals.Therefore,the thesis thoroughly studies the further reading part from the text length,theme,style,readability and its relationships with the main text.The study selects three sets of widely used Integrated English textbooks,and carries out qualitative evaluation and quantitative analysis from the five aspects mentioned above.The study also conducts a questionnaire to senior English majors and English majors who graduated in recent years so as to know their attitudes towards English reading as well as their opinions on FRP text design in the IntegratedEnglish textbooks and proposes some advice on textbook design from students’ perspective.By researching the author achieves several findings.Themes of texts in the Integrated English textbooks can be classified into eight categories: politics and history,social life,emotional relations and psychology,culture and art,education and popular science,ecology,philosophy and morality.Among them,“education and popular science” and “emotional relations and psychology” are the most popular ones.And text styles can be classified into six categories: narrative writing I,narrative writing II,expository writings,descriptive writings,argumentative writings as well as practical writings.And according to the questionnaire,English majors like expository writings and narrative writings most.There are significant differences among the FRP readability of the three sets of Integrated English textbooks.FRP texts in An Integrated English Course are more difficult to read than those in the other two.Thematically related main texts and further reading texts can be categorized into extended reading,in-depth reading and innovative reading.Finally,based on the findings of the study the author provides some suggestions for users of the Integrated English textbooks(English majors and teachers)respectively and also gives suggestions on further reading part design to the compilers of the textbooks.