| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 92 === ABSTRACT
On September 30th, 1998, the Ministry of Education announced that new versions of vocational high school English textbooks are supposed to be designed in the principles of communicative language teaching. The textbook publishers and editors must follow the CLT principles to censor their works. Prior to publication, the works must be reviewed by the National Institute of Translation and Complication (NITC). In sum, vocational high school teachers started using new versions of textbooks in September 2000.
In such an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) country as Taiwan, students study English mainly from the curriculum. In addition, it was said in the west that the textbook should not be “king” over all other sources, but be “brother” to all of them. That is to say, textbooks are the main sources for studying in the classroom. And reading is the direct way in which students can be involved in the target language and literature. Most importantly, after analyzing the statistic data, the researcher also found teachers’ teaching atmosphere and style, students’ achievements, and reading materials are all correlated with one another in positive significance at all. Therefore, the content of reading section and reading aids and the design of the reading activities are crucial to a communicative reading class.
However, if the new versions of textbooks facilitate teachers to teach in a more relaxed and communicative way or not is what I have been concerned about. Therefore, this study intended to explore the current situation of English teaching materials selection and the degree of communicative language teaching principle applied in reading materials in senior school in Taiwan. All data were derived from questionnaires returned by 198 English teachers from Kaohsiung private and public vocational high schools.
The results showed that younger, fewer years of teaching experienced, female, and public school English teachers performed better in encouraging students to do communicative activities. Next, English teachers who had ever attended the CLT premised workshops and graduated from Normal University had much confidence in communicative language teaching and so were the English speaking proficient teachers.
It is also found that most of the teachers recommended the textbooks and then had them reviewed and selected by all English teachers of their school. Besides, most English teachers had never attended the CLT premised materials instruction studies. Although most teachers were satisfied with the content of reading materials, they hardly had any positive attitude toward the design of reading exercise, aids, and activities. Above all, students were not very interested in English learning.
In addition to these, most of the teachers complained that students’ motivation was their chief concern for teaching and claimed the contents of the reading materials had also a close effect on teachers’ teaching effectiveness. I hope some implications revealed from the study would provoke the much attention of English curriculum innovators and textbook editors to produce the textbook materials on the basis of communicative language teaching. In addition, the difficulties that prevented teachers from teaching reading communicatively were explored and the available ways to solve those problems were suggested as well.
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