English Book 3 (Part 1 and Part 2)

Author: Hong Ming, Liu Shengming, Xu Pinzhong, Wang Hui
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-07-01
Features: Developing higher vocational education, cultivating and training applied talents for production, management, service, and technical lines objectively requires us to pay great attention to the reform and construction of teaching materials for higher vocational education. According to the actual situation of students and the training objectives, compiling and publishing a large number of excellent teaching materials that reflect the characteristics of higher vocational education is our effort and goal. English, as an important compulsory and foundational course in higher vocational and technical colleges, requires urgent teaching material development. However, after extensive questionnaire surveys and practical visits, the compilers learned that most higher vocational and technical colleges currently use general English teaching materials with a relatively high starting point, focusing more on natural sciences and literary works, which do not suit students' English proficiency upon enrollment or their post-graduation application needs. In the training of "listening, speaking, reading, and writing" skills, there is an overemphasis on one aspect of skill training. Some teaching materials also have an excessive amount of tasks, far exceeding the class hours students spend in school, and the exercises do not cater to the Higher College English Application Ability Test for higher vocational and technical students, and so on. To better reflect the characteristics and requirements of public English teaching at the higher vocational and technical level, truly putting students at the center and starting from their actual needs, this series of teaching materials strives to embody the following features in terms of writing format, textbook structure, student needs, and classroom teaching:
(1) Closely aligned with teaching syllabus requirements and actual classroom teaching. All contributing editors of this series are experienced frontline English teachers, with 80% being department directors or public English teaching and research section heads currently teaching. Years of frontline teaching experience have given them a deep understanding of the current state of English teaching in higher vocational and technical colleges, enabling them to tailor teaching materials to students' actual conditions and training objectives.
(2) Fresh and up-to-date material selection. All materials in this series are selected from new newspapers, magazines, and online articles, with strong readability, engaging content, lively formats, and content that fully reflects contemporary characteristics, making it truly "living" English.
(3) Adaptable to students' examination needs. This series fully considers the objective needs of higher vocational and technical students to take English proficiency exams (Higher College English Application Ability Test), incorporating various question types based on the Ministry of Education's "Higher College English Application Ability Test Syllabus and Sample Questions," helping students master fundamental English knowledge and skills.
(4) Integrated and modular structure. This series focuses on cultivating students' daily communication skills in listening and speaking training, uses intensive and extensive reading materials around a single theme to train comprehensive skills, emphasizes writing methods, techniques, and daily practical writing exercises in the writing section, ensuring synchronized improvement in listening, speaking, reading, writing, and overall English proficiency.
(5) Emphasis on bridging with secondary school English knowledge. Considering that higher vocational and technical students often have weak English foundations upon enrollment, this series includes review exercises in the first and second volumes to reinforce high school-level English knowledge and skills.
To facilitate classroom teaching arrangements, the compilers offer the following suggestions for classroom teaching:
Listening Comprehension: Includes short conversations, situational dialogues, and passage listening, primarily covering daily life scenarios. Suggested duration: 1 class hour.
Speaking Development: Includes topic introduction, situational dialogues, useful sentences and expressions, oral practice, cultural background, and a humorous story, covering all major daily life scenarios with strong practicality and fun. Suggested duration: 1 class hour.
Integrated Course: Composed of text, language points of the text, text comprehension exercises, vocabulary, structure, and comprehensive exercises. The first and second volumes also include a comprehensive revision to review and consolidate key high school content. Suggested duration: 3 class hours.
Reading Training: Includes in-class reading and reading exercises, with material selection consistent with the integrated course section. Suggested duration: 1 class hour.
Writing Work: The first volume focuses on basic skills training, such as sentence and paragraph organization methods; the second volume focuses on applied writing, emphasizing techniques and methods for common practical writing; the third and fourth volumes focus on essay writing, further training writing skills. Suggested duration: 1 class hour.
We organized more than 80 frontline teachers from over 60 higher vocational and technical colleges across the country to participate in the compilation of this series, combining their teaching experience, understanding of students' English proficiency and classroom realities, and their rich teaching materials. After completing the preliminary drafts, we had experienced professors and foreign teachers systematically review the entire manuscript. The expert team included Yu Dong, Zhou Li, Zhou Zhengtai, Hu Guangzhong, Zhang Yunqin, Rong Huali, Lu Runhai, as well as American teachers Leo Shofield and Jonathan Andrews, for whose hard work we express heartfelt gratitude. Especially, the renowned English educator Professor Zhang Daozhen took on the role of chief editor for this series, for which we extend our sincere thanks.
Although we have always strived to align the teaching syllabus with the actual teaching practices of higher vocational and technical English during the drafting and finalization of this series, due to the compilers' limitations in knowledge and expertise, this series is bound to have various shortcomings and issues. We sincerely invite teachers and students to provide valuable suggestions and feedback during use, which can be sent directly to qiu1965@21cn.com. We express our heartfelt gratitude for their support.