A Comparative Study On The Cultural Contents In China Mainland And Hong Kong High School English Textbooks

In the background of economic globalization,cultivating students’ cultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence is not only the requirement of the high school English curriculum standards,but also the requirement of this age.Language and culture should not be taught separately in English class for they are inseparable.The textbook plays a vital role in English teaching.It is not only the main learning material for students,but also the main teaching tool for teachers.The cultural contents and its arrangement and presentation styles in the textbooks influence students’ acquisition of cultural knowledge and cultivation of cultural awareness.Hong Kong is an international financial center,so its level of English education is slightly higher than that of the mainland.Its English textbook compilation has certain referent values for that of China mainland.In this study,two sets of high school English textbooks,New Senior English for China(NSEFC)and Longman Activate New Senior Secondary(LANSS),are selected as the object of comparison.Based on the intercultural communication theory and cultural schema theory,this study adopts the literature method,comparative analysis method and text analysis method to systematically compare the cultural contents in these two textbooks.This study mainly consists of the following two aspects:(1)macro-level study: the comparison of the overall arrangement and presentation of cultural contents in these two textbooks(2)micro-level study: the comparison of the geographical origins,cultural types and cultural ages of cultural contents in these two textbooks.The findings are as follows:(1)In terms of overall arrangement and presentation,NSEFC relatively lacks coherence.In NSEFC,the authentic materials are insufficient and the ways of presentation are relatively simple.LANSS is coherent and most of its articles are taken from the authentic materials and the ways of presentation are various.(2)In terms of geographical origin,NSEFC is related to many countries in the world,and the percentage of cultural contents of the target language culture is relatively high.But the content of the native culture is insufficient,which is not conducive to fostering students’ equal cultural awareness.LANSS is mainly based on Hong Kong’s native culture and target culture,and lacks the cultural contents of other countries and regions.(3)In terms of the cultural types,neither textbook is comprehensiveenough in coverage.They both lack a deeper interpretation of the culture.(4)In terms of the cultural ages,compared with LANSS,NSEFC lacks of contemporary cultural contents,which is not conducive to the renewal of students’ constellation of cultural knowledge.According to the findings,this study puts forward some suggestions to the textbook compilers and teachers,with the hope of providing some references for the selection and arrangement of the cultural contents in high school English textbooks.