English Book 1 () with CD-ROM

Author: Yu Dong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-04-01
Features: Developing higher vocational education, cultivating and training high-level applied talents for production, management, service, and technical lines objectively requires us to attach great importance to the reform and construction of teaching materials for higher vocational education. Based on 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 high starting point, focusing primarily on natural sciences and literary works, which do not align with 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 particular aspect. Additionally, some teaching materials include excessive task volumes, 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 in higher vocational and technical colleges, 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 contributors to this series are experienced frontline English teachers, with 80% serving as department heads or directors of public English teaching offices. Their years of frontline teaching experience enable them to understand the current state of English teaching in higher vocational and technical colleges, allowing them to tailor teaching materials to students' actual situations and training objectives.
(2) Fresh and engaging material selection. All materials in this series are selected from new newspapers, magazines, and online articles, with strong readability, interesting content, lively formats, and content that fully reflects contemporary characteristics—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," to help students master fundamental English knowledge and skills.
(4) Integrated and modular structure. The series focuses on developing students' daily communication skills in listening and speaking training, integrates comprehensive skills training around thematic reading materials, and emphasizes writing methods, techniques, and practical document writing 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 this series:
Listening Comprehension: Includes short conversations, situational dialogues, and passage listening, primarily covering daily life scenarios. Suggested duration: 1 class hour.
Speaking Development: Covers topic introduction, situational dialogues, useful sentences and expressions, oral practice, cultural background, and humorous stories, encompassing all major daily life scenarios with strong practicality and. Suggested duration: 1 class hour.
Integrated Course: Comprises 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 emphasizes applied writing, practicing techniques and methods for common practical documents; the third and fourth volumes further train essay writing skills. Suggested duration: 1 class hour.
We organized over 80 frontline teachers from more than 60 higher vocational and technical colleges across the country to participate in the writing of this series, combining their teaching experience, understanding of students' English proficiency and classroom realities, and their rich teaching materials. After completing the first draft, we engaged experienced professors and foreign teachers to conduct a systematic review of 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, among others. We sincerely express our gratitude for their hard work. In particular, the renowned English educator Professor Zhang Daozhen took on the role of chief editor for this series, and we deeply appreciate their dedication.
Although we have always strived to align the teaching syllabus with the actual teaching practice 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 feedback and suggestions during use and may send them directly to qiu1965@21cn.com. We express our heartfelt gratitude for your support.