Content Analysis And Usage Investigation On PEP Senior English Teacher's Guide

As an indispensable part of the course package,teacher's guide offers teachers help for preparing lessons and conducting class teaching activities.In 2004,the Ministry of Education carried out the investigation for current primary and secondary school teacher's guide.90% of the primary and secondary school teachers express their needs to use teacher's guide for understanding the textbook,to collect relevant teaching materials and conduct instructional designs(The People Education Press,2006: 4).While the satisfaction rate of front-line teachers on teacher's guide is only45%(The People Education Press,2006: 2).Meanwhile,compared with the textbook researches,the researches related to the teacher's guide are rather sparse,especially in English subject.If teacher's guides can fully achieve functions,they can not only guide teachers to carry out teaching activities,but also help teachers to understand the principles and practices of language teaching better,to develop teaching skills,and finally to promote the professional development.Thus,it is extremely necessary to carry out relevant researches on English teacher's guide and collect some real feedback from front-line teachers.This paper locates at the PEP Senior English Teacher's Guide published by People's Education Press in 2007 and tries to do the content analysis as well as the investigation on the current usage,putting the following research questions:1)How is the PEP Senior English Teacher's Guide used by Senior English teachers ?2)Are the nine functions proposed by Cunningsworth applicable to the PEP Senior English Teacher's Guide ?The objects in the research are 75 English teachers from three key senior public schools at the Municipal or County levels,which take the Senior English for China published by People's Education Press as the textbook and teacher's guide in Guangdong Province.This paper tries to do the content analysis for what functions have been realized in the text of the PEP senior English Teacher's Guide,combining with the questionnaire survey of the 75 senior high school English teachers and the interview results of 6 teachers from three schools respectively by using the qualitativeand quantitative research methods together to explore and answer the above two questions.It is found that there is a high utilization rate but low satisfaction rate for the current usage towards the PEP Senior English Teacher's Guide.More than sixty percent teachers show their dissatisfaction and reckon it cannot meet their actual teaching needs.Combined the text analysis with function investigation results,it is clear that although the PEP Senior English Teacher's Guide has achieved some functions needed,there are still quite a few areas for further improvement,such as the lack of necessary linguistic information and the rationale for the methodology used according to the feedback from front-line teachers.Therefore,this paper further optimizes and puts forward a set of functional evaluation checklist which is more suitable for Chinese teacher's guide for reference to textbook compilers and teachers.