Research On Cultural Orientation Of English Textbooks In Junior Middle School

Language is closely related to culture, and learning a language also entails learning the culture of the target language country. Compulsory Education:Standards for English Language Teaching (2011version)(Standards for short) released by the Ministry of Education in2011, which absorbs both domestic and overseas research achievements on the relationship between culture and foreign language teaching, clearly includes the cultivation of students’ cross-culture awareness as one of the basic goals of English language teaching, and specifies goals for different grades of cross-culture awareness in compulsory education, and that goals for English courses are to be established in the following five aspects:linguistic skills, linguistic knowledge, emotions and attitudes, learning strategies and culture awareness.On the basis of the relationship between culture and English teaching and according to the different grades of cross-culture awareness specified by Standards, this thesis analyzes first the topics and functions of each unit of the secondary school English textbooks (New Version) published by Yilin Press from the perspective of knowledge culture and communicative culture, and then the major discourses, comprehensive skills and writing-targeted discourses according to target language culture, native culture, world culture, comparative culture and other culture, and concludes that the Yilin English textbooks mentioned above put emphasis on nurturing students’cultural awareness, contain rich cultural contents and fit for the teaching of culture with their cultural contents basically conforming to the five grades of cross-culture awareness specified by Standards. This paper conducts tests for Grade Eight students’ cross-cultural communicative competence in the29th Middle School of Nanjing and learns the status quo and weaknesses of their cross-cultural communicative competence based on analysis of the acquired data. And in the end this thesis explores textbook-based strategies for cultivating students’ cross-cultural communicative competence according to their status quo:re-integrating the textbooks, digging deep the cultural contents in them and collecting extensively the target language materials close to real target language environment; in the meantime, English teachers should change their teaching ideology, enhance the comparative research on the difference between English and Chinese culture, attach due importance to students’non-verbal communicative competence, realize creative teaching in cooperative teaching, conduct much training for students’ cross-cultural communicative competence, help them take a correct attitude towards cross-cultural communication, and thus cultivate their cross-cultural communicative competence.