Textbook evaluation : task design in Go for it and Project English

Abstract

In 2003, the Ministry of Education in China released the National English Curriculum Standards (NECS) to regulate institutional policy and pedagogical practice. The release of the NECS (2003) represents a marked shift in the pedagogy that English teachers are expected to adopt in China: task-based language teaching (TBLT) methodology has become the central principle driving the English language curriculum and has been recorded great importance in this document. English teachers are recommended to utilize the task-based language teaching approach in English classrooms and they are provided with guidelines to develop appropriate teaching tasks. In accordance with the NECS (2003), a number of teaching materials have been locally designed and published for secondary education in China. In this study, two English language textbook series Go for it (2013) and Project English (2013) that are intended for secondary school students from Grade 7 to Grade 9 were evaluated to investigate how the concept of TBLT has been incorporated in English language teaching (ELT) textbooks in China. A two-stage analysis that involved an impressionistic overview and a detailed text analysis was adopted to examine the task design in the two sets of textbooks. The findings of the analysis show that both textbook series display features of TBLT during the compiling process and exhibit a careful design of tasks in terms of the task input, classroom settings, task types and task themes. The findings of the study can provide some meaningful considerations concerning language teaching and the compilation of task-based teaching materials, which can contribute to the development of English language education in China. In achieving the research aim, this study can also make contributions to the research field of textbook evaluation.

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