An Analysis Of The New PEP Senior High School English Textbooks From The Perspective Of Core Literacy

As a basic cultural course in senior high school,English course aims to develop students’ English core literacy and cultivate individuals.English teaching materials are an important part of teaching activities.On one hand,the textbook should fully implement the comprehensive development of language ability,cultural awareness,thinking quality and learning ability,on the other,the users should understand the embodiment of core literacy in the textbook clearly.Therefore,it is paramount to analyze the new version of the PEP English textbook from the perspective of English core literacy.Through text analysis and surveying,this paper studies the new version of the PEP compulsory English textbooks.The author selects 56 senior English teachers who teach in Senior Grade One and 325 Senior Grade One students.This article aims to study these contents: 1)The analysis of the consistency between the new version of the PEP English textbooks and the English core literacy.2)A survey of the achievement of the English core literacy of the new version of the PEP English textbooks by teachers and students.Through the textual analysis and survey,this study finds that:1)The cultivation of language ability in the textbook is designed based on the compulsory curriculum requirement of English Curriculum Standard for General High School(2017 version),some of them is meat with the requirement of the fourth level of China’s Standards of English Language Ability;there are special sections for pronunciation knowledge and grammar knowledge.Vocabulary knowledge,pragmatic knowledge and discourse knowledge are infiltrated in various kinds of materials in the textbooks.The proportion concerning the theme of “human and ego” and “human and nature” is low.The textbooks attach equal importance to native language culture,world culture,and target language culture and promote students to compare different cultural phenomena.As for the cultivation of thinking quality,the observation and comparison level is designed in the section of Discovering Useful Structure,the analysis and inference level in the section of Listening and Speaking and Reading and Writing,the generalization and construction level in the section of Discovering Useful Structure,and the criticism and innovation level is designed in different sections,most notably in Reading for Writing.Different sections of the textbook reflect the cultivation of different learning strategies,which can improve students’ learning ability.2)The teachers’ questionnaire indicates that teachers show high overall satisfaction with the materials(M=1.329),and meanwhile demonstrates a decreasing trend with increasing teaching experience among the different groups,but the difference among the groups is not significant(F=2.817;Sig=0.069).The rank is: Language ability(M=1.414)> culture awareness(M=1.387)> thinking quality(M=1.293)> learning ability(M=1.286)> the overall impression of the textbook(M=1.036).The student’s questionnaire reveals that the students’ overall satisfaction of the teaching materials is low(M=0.497)and shows an increasing trend with increasing English achievement,with significant differences among groups(F=16.909;Sig=0.000).The rank is: language ability(M=0.562)> culture awareness(M=0.533)> thinking quality(M=0.484)> learning ability(M=0.374)> the overall impression of the textbook(M=0.340).This study conducts an analysis of the development of students’ core literacy in English materials of the new PEP textbooks,and shows the users’ evaluation of the textbooks after using them,hoping to provide some references for teachers in implementing the development of students’ core literacy with the use of textbooks.