A Comparative Study Of Reading Materials In Old And New Versions Of Senior High English Compulsory Textbooks Published By FLTRP

Textbooks work as the media of students’ learning and teachers’ teaching and they are regarded as the threshold of learners’ language knowledge.Textbooks of senior high are the main language materials for students’ language learning and they play an important role in students’ language development.Among those language materials provided by textbooks,reading materials are indispensable teaching resources.Language corpus contained in the reading materials of textbooks offers students rich language input and also provides reference for students’ oral English and writing output.Students’ further study is finished under the guidance of reading materials’ such aspects like topics and discourse types.In 2019,Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press published a new version of textbooks.Compared with the old version published in 2006,the new version of textbooks has made many changes,especially in reading materials.Literature review proves that just a few researchers have performed comparative study on reading materials of these two versions of textbooks because only three years has elapsed since the new version of textbooks was published.To help teachers finish a smooth transition from reading materials in the old version to that in the new version,it is necessary to find out the exact changes that reading materials in new version of textbooks have made.The research devotes to answering two questions: 1.What are the differences of reading materials in two versions of textbooks on topics,discourse types,length and vocabulary? 2.What are teachers’ and students’ feedback on the topics,discourse types,length and vocabulary of reading materials in the new version of textbooks? To solve the these two questions,the research takes compulsory textbook 1 and textbook 2of the two versions of textbooks as examples.Firstly,the method of text analysis is adopted to collect data of topics,discourse types,length and vocabulary.Then,it investigates teachers’ and students’ feedback on these four aspects through two questionnaires.The research shows that: the new version of textbooks covers more new sub-topics of the three topics and these sub-topics take a relatively balanced proportion;narration and exposition constitute the main body of two versions of textbooks’ reading materials but the new version contains more discourse types than the old version;reading materials in new version of textbooks contain more words in total;in old version of textbooks,the first passage of each unit has much more words than the second passage but in new version of textbooks there is no such gap;sentences in new version of textbooks’ reading materials have more new words than that in old version on average.Besides,users of new textbooks hold a generally supportive attitude towards topics,discourse types,length and vocabulary of reading materials in the new version of textbooks and they support the design of topics most.But there are still gaps between teachers’ and students’ degree of agreement.Some suggestions are brought out based on the results gained in the research,hoping to provide help for students’ learning and teachers’ usage of the new version of textbooks.