The evaluation of an English course book is very important for a language teacher to gauge whether the book is effective or not in developing the learners' language skills in listening, speaking, reading and writing. There are a wide variety of English course books for non-English majors at present in China. In addition, there are various evaluations of English language teaching materials in foreign countries. There is also some evaluation of English course books available in China. However, the evaluation in China seem to be book reviews, which focus on the design of the course books, the content of the book and so on. This article proposes an evaluation plan based on Ellis (1997,1998), which involves the approach to be adopted, content, methods to collect data and data analysis, hoping to raise awareness of evaluation of teaching materials in China and to provide some rationale for the evaluation of a course book. The course book used as an example for the evaluation is the New College English (students' book) edited by the English Language Department of Zhejiang University and published by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in Beijing, China. The evaluation focuses on the grammatical items, vocabulary, reading practice, listening practice and functional speaking in the book.
