A Study On The Cultural Contents In Reading Passages Of NSEC From The Perspective Of The New Curriculum Standards

The English Curriculum Standards for General Senior High Schools(2017 edition 2020 revision)clearly stipulates that its specific goal is to cultivate and develop the core quality of the subject.Among them,cultural awareness is one of the four major contents of the core quality of the English subject,which reflects its value orientation.The Curriculum Standards also emphasizes that cultural knowledge is one of the six elements of English Curriculum content.Understanding and contacting the culture of English speaking countries is conducive to the understanding and use of English,the cultivation of world awareness,the formation of cross-cultural communication ability and deepening the understanding of their own culture.Therefore,the status of culture in foreign language teaching has also been promoted to a higher level.For senior high school students,textbooks are the most important source of learning English for them.Based on this,the author thinks it is necessary to analyze and study the cultural contents contained in our current senior high school textbooks.According to Cheng Xiaotang’s teaching material evaluation theory,this study adopts the research methods of combining qualitative and quantitative,which can be divided into internal evaluation and external evaluation.It mainly answers the following three questions: 1.What is the overall distribution of different cultural contents of the reading passages in the senior high school English textbooks(NSEC)? 2.Do the cultural contents in the reading passages of senior high school English textbooks reflect the requirements of cultural knowledge in English Curriculum Standards(2017)? 3.What are the perceptions of both teachers and students towards the cultural contents in the textbooks?Firstly,according to The English Curriculum Standards for General Senior High Schools(2017 edition 2020 revision)issued by the Ministry of education and Kachru’s classification of culture,reading and the using language parts of book 1-7 are analyzed.Secondly,the author makes appropriate adjustments according to the content of the New Curriculum Standards on the basis of Zhang Gecheng & Zhang Hongyan’s questionnaire design,and conducts a questionnaire survey on 200 students and 30 teachers.Finally,five teachers and ten students are selected for interviews to further understand the teachers’ and students’ evaluation and suggestions on the cultural contents contained in the reading section of textbooks and their attitudes towards cultural teaching.In this study,text analysis was carried out,at the same time,the author did a descriptive analysis of the data with the help of SPSS25.0software.The results are as follows: 1.The cultural contents in textbooks is rich,involving various places,different aspects of culture,but the overall distribution of different cultural contents in the textbooks is not balanced.The proportion of spiritual culture content is relatively larger than the content of material culture,and the content of clothing and transportation is not involved.There are many inner circle culture and expending circle culture,but the outer circle culture and contrast culture are relatively less involved.2.The requirements of cultural contents in the New Curriculum Standards(2017)are matched well with the compulsory textbooks,while there are four points in the requirements of the New Curriculum Standards for selective compulsory textbooks,which are not reflected in the textbooks and needed to be improved.3.According to the results of the questionnaires and interviews,the teachers are satisfied with the cultural contents in PEP high school English textbooks on the whole.They think that the textbooks reflect the requirements of the New Curriculum Standards and help to cultivate students’ cultural awareness.However,they are not satisfied slightly with the arrangement of culture contents in the textbooks,which needs to be improved.Most students think that the cultural contents in the textbooks can meet the needs of cultural knowledge in senior high school and help to improve their ability of cross-cultural communication and dissemination of Chinese culture.But,some students hold that cultural contents in the textbook are not closely related to their real life and lack interest.Based on the above findings and problems,the author proposes some suggestions for teachers and compilers,hoping that this study can provide other relevant textbook researchers with some reference and promote the development of foreign language culture teaching.