Mapping Coursebooks with Students' Proficiency Levels and Oral Communicative Abilities: A Case Study of a Senior High School in China

Nowadays, people need to learn English for communication, but not all learners succeed in language use to communicate. This is especially the case of Chinese students. They have difficulties in English oral communication, though they can get high scores in English standardized tests like TOEFL and IELTS. This discordance may be caused by many factors and an important one is probably the coursebooks that are used, as coursebook is the bridge to link up objectives with students’ abilities. To solve this problem, the Ministry of Education in China has made a lot of attempts in improving coursebooks used, teaching methodology, education system, National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) and so on. This study aimed to find out the results of the improvement of coursebooks used in China, students’ proficiency levels and oral communicative abilities after using the new coursebooks, addressing three questions: 1. what are the communicative levels of the coursebooks used in China? 2. What are students’ general proficiency levels after studying the coursebooks? 3. What are students’ oral communicative abilities after studying the coursebooks? The subjects were 59 third year high school students. The results showed that the coursebooks used were highly communicative as a whole but with weaknesses in input and activity; the students’ proficiency levels were at the average level like before and the students’ oral communication abilities were still very poor. The findings suggest that the changing of the coursebooks did not help in cultivating communicative ability in students. The coursebooks still lack important characteristics of authentic input and communicative activities that require students to exchange information. Key word: coursebook analysis; objectives; proficiency levels; oral communicative abilities;