RESUMO
One goal of undergraduate courses in Business English is teaching critical thinking, but this goal has been hindered by disagreement over how to teach those skills. Many textbooks pay insufficient attention to critical thinking skills. It remains unclear how effective existing textbooks are in helping teachers teach these skills. In this article, we report on a study which uses the Knowledge Process framework to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate five textbooks in the Market Leader series. The presence of four knowledge processes in the textbooks is examined to see how effective the distribution of those processes is in teaching critical thinking skills. Although four knowledge processes are found in the textbooks, there is an imbalance among sub-processes, which leads to lack of scaffolding for teaching critical thinking skills. It is thus recommended that textbook developers and teachers design a sequence of scaffolded tasks to help teach critical thinking skills.
RESUMO
Researchers have taken an interest to study the language of English materials that learners use in different contexts. One line of inquiry is to examine the pragmatic competence potential of such materials. This study aimed at examining the use of speech acts and language functions in the 21st Century English for Libya Secondary 1, 2, and 3 course books and workbooks. To achieve this aim, a frequency-based analysis of language functions and speech acts in the conversation sections in the five course books and five workbooks was followed. A data analysis revealed that the distribution of speech acts and language functions is highly skewed; in each analysis domain, a given category accounted for almost half of the data while other categories accounted for little or even none. Findings are used to argue that Libyan students need a more balanced and language-in-use informed distribution of English functions and speech acts to learn the pragmatic features of English; otherwise, they are less likely to become communicatively competent in speech acts and functions that have been not been treated adequately. The findings also highlight that the unequal frequency and distribution of these pragmatic variables are in line with previous studies and provide implications for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) curriculum, material designers, and language practitioners.
RESUMO
Textbook evaluation is of great significance in teaching studies and activities. By taking the establishment of evaluation index system forExperimental Acupuncture-moxibustion Science as an example, this article discussed the process and method of adopting the analytic hierarchy process for textbook evaluation: 3 levels, 4 dimensions, and 20 evaluation indexes were developed for the evaluation ofExperimental Acupuncture-moxibustion Science textbook, and each component of the indexes was assigned weight, based on which, a scale was established and preliminarily evaluated, in order to provide reference for the evaluation of the textbooks of traditional Chinese medicine.
RESUMO
Textbook evaluation is of great significance in teaching studies and activities. By taking the establishment of evaluation index system forExperimental Acupuncture-moxibustion Science as an example, this article discussed the process and method of adopting the analytic hierarchy process for textbook evaluation: 3 levels, 4 dimensions, and 20 evaluation indexes were developed for the evaluation ofExperimental Acupuncture-moxibustion Science textbook, and each component of the indexes was assigned weight, based on which, a scale was established and preliminarily evaluated, in order to provide reference for the evaluation of the textbooks of traditional Chinese medicine.
