A Corpus Tools-assisted Evaluation of Three ESP Textbooks in China

Abstract

ESP textbook plays an important role in facilitating students to develop their profession-related language skills. However, ESP textbooks published in China are less developed and often criticized as ignoring the training of language skills. This research aims to reveal the specific problems of China’s ESP textbooks by conducting a multiple-case study. Three ESP textbooks used by ESP courses participants from G University in China were selected: “Computer Professional English Course” “Advertising English” and “Logistics English”. The research investigated their performance focusing on six aspects: coverage of language skills, text features, coverage of discourse functions, recycling, organization and difficulty. The content was analyzed by three different corpus tools. It is found that the three textbooks place too much emphasis on reading and vocabulary, lacking the training of listening skill, speaking skill, as well as the delivery of certain learning strategies. All three textbooks involve a wide range of discourse functions. The texts are informative academic texts, but organized by subject matter only, rather than a synthesis of subject matter, language points and language skills. There is scarce recycling of language points in two of the books and texts through all of them do not indicate a rising difficulty. It is concluded that the drawbacks of the three ESP textbooks far outweigh their merits. By uncovering problems of three ESP textbooks in China the research provides useful reference for future ESP textbook compilation.

Exploring the Flexibility of Esp Materials Through the Ipo Model: Corpus and Consumer Insights From the Turkish Efl Context

“…Complementary evidence from the procedural taxonomy and opposing user responses to the unit structure suggested that since it takes time, effort and money to write varied and creative activities for presenting and practising language engagingly, CPD chose to employ the same type and number of activities in look-alike units, and thus self-inflicted the same inflexibility, for which many ESP materials have frequently been stigmatised as "assembly-line" productions (Ferguson, 2013;Gomez-Rodriguez, 2010;Hutchinson & Waters, 2010, p. 107;Mountford, 1988;Pilbeam, 1987). For this reason, like others in the past, wanting a change from their fixed, reading-and word-focused ESP course, the present participants too required more involvement in small-group fun oral-fluency activities rather than "reproductive language work" (Celik, 2018;Nunan, 2004, p. 32;Ou, 2019;Razmjoo & Raissi, 2010;Wang, 2010). In addition to more room for creativity in their communicative outputs, Turkish DS, being no different from other lower-level EFL learners, using global English materials, demanded bilingual support, grammar reference and extra language practice for three main reasons: i. L1 equivalents facilitated vocabularybuilding and enabled cross-lingual/cultural comparisons, ii.…”

“…It was also worth noting that corpus evidence was seldom employed to corroborate findings from expert and user reviews; for instance, frequency counts of technical words were performed to crosscheck appropriateness of lexical content in Darani's (2014) comparison of local andglobal ESP materials andBoshrabadi et al's (2015) investigation of teacher/student-perceived lexical needs and coursebook realisations, whereas Ou (2019) alone used corpus tools to determine the extent of subject coverage, variety of discourse markers, amount of vocabulary recycling and text difficulty levels across Chinese-made series. Scantiness of corpus information, coupled with overuse of generic checklists/schemes, may however have led to duplicative results on coursebook efficiency because global materials often achieved user satisfaction in almost all aspects except for provision of L1support and culturally-responsive teaching (e.g.…”

An Evaluation Method of English Teaching Based on Machine Learning

“…e non-quantitative evaluation discussed in this paper does not take objective teaching evaluation as the evaluation index, but uses effective evaluation means to make a qualitative analysis of English classroom teaching, timely feedback evaluation teaching, and evaluation, which depends on the realization of teaching and the learning evaluation system, including quantitative and qualitative evaluation indexes, so as to motivate students who often participate in English learning. It also provides teaching reference for English teachers in Classroom Teaching [12][13][14][15].…”