A Corpus-based Study Of English Key Competencies In PEP Middle School Textbooks

Nowadays,the research of key competencies has attracted much attention,and the research of key competencies of English subject has also been accompanied by the release of relevant documents in China,which has become one of the hot issues in the domestic education field in recent years.Based on a self-built corpus of Junior middle school English textbooks,the study was designed to examine the distribution and variation of the English key competencies in the textbooks.Through the text analysis method,starting from the linguistic ability,cultural awareness,thinking quality and learning ability of the key competencies of the English subject,this study conducts a detailed analysis of the five textbooks in the English textbook taught by junior middle school students,and explores the following questions:1.How are the key competencies distributed in PEP junior middle school English textbooks?2.How does the distribution of key competencies vary among English textbooks from Grades 7 to 9?Through analyzing its own PEP junior middle school corpus,we arrived at the following findings:First,in terms of the distribution of the four key competencies,language ability takes the largest proportion,followed by thinking quality.The language ability and thinking quality is significantly different from the frequency of learning ability and cultural awareness,which indicates that the teaching material is not balanced in the cultivation of the four English key competencies.Second,the overall distribution of language ability in different grades reveals a linear decrease.While the proportion of thinking quality and learning ability of these three grades is increasing year by year.However the overall proportion of the two dimensions declined significantly,indicating that the cultivation of thinking quality and learning ability has not been paid enough attention.In terms of the proportion of cultural awareness among the three grades,the ninth grade pays particular attention to the cultivation of cultural awareness,accounting for half of the three years.Therefore,this study proposes the following suggestions for the authors of textbooks: the content of cultural awareness should increase the knowledge of traditional Chinese culture,cultivate students’ awareness of cultural communication,and be inclusive.The activity design of the learning ability content should keep pace with the times in light of the situation of different school sections.The content of thinking quality should be presented in a variety of ways,and more activity projects should be written to cultivate students’ critical thinking ability;The content design of language proficiency should be in line with the academic situation of students in different school sections.In addition,teachers should flexibly use teaching materials and teaching resources in the teaching process,adjust the order of content according to the needs of classroom teaching,and infiltrate the key competencies content of English disciplines into the teaching process.