A Comparative Study Of Cultural Representation Between Senior High School English Textbooks Of New Senior English For China And Foreign Language Teaching And Research Press

For a long time,due to the limitations of time and conditions,students’ cultural learning is fragmented.The lack of cultural background knowledge among students leads to“cultural aphasia”.English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017 Edition 2020 Revision)sets the goal of cultivating students’ cultural awareness,requiring students to have the ability to communicate across cultures and disseminate excellent Chinese culture.The English textbooks for senior high school are compiled according to the requirements of the curriculum standards.The preface of the textbooks points out that the textbooks can deepen students’ understanding about excellent cultures by presenting Chinese and foreign cultures.Therefore,this study compares the cultural representation between New Senior English for China(NSEFC)and Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press(FLTRP).This study selects the most widely used senior high school English textbooks in China,namely,NSEFC and FLTRP,and takes compulsory and optional compulsory textbooks as the research objects.The study uses the framework of cultural representation content and framework of cultural representation form,aiming to answer two research questions:(1)What are the similarities and differences in cultural representation contents,including cultural regions and cultural types,between NSEFC and FLTRP?(2)What are the similarities and differences in cultural representation forms,including explicit representation and implicit representation,between NSEFC and FLTRP?After coding and data analysis of the cultural representation of the textbooks,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)In terms of cultural representation contents,in the two sets of textbooks,the highest representation intensity is cultural products,and the lowest representation intensity is cultural communities.In addition,the cultural representation contents in the two sets of textbooks are dominated by native language culture and target language culture,and the intensity of contrastive culture is low.However,the difference is that NSEFC is dominated by native language culture,while FLTRP is dominated by target language culture.(2)In terms of cultural representation forms,the cultural representation forms in both sets of textbooks are mainly texts,and the explicit representation forms account for a greater proportion in both sets of textbooks.However,compared with FLTRP,NSEFC focuses more on explicit representation,and FLTRP pays more attention to implicit representation.Therefore,this study provides suggestions for English teachers and textbook editors.On the one hand,teachers can adjust and supplement the cultural contents in textbooks according to the requirements of the curriculum standard,students’ reality,and social development.In addition,teachers can also make full use of and appropriately expand the implicit representation forms in textbooks,and enrich the representation forms with the help of modern multimedia devices.On the other hand,textbook editors can balance the representation of different cultures in textbooks,and appropriately add the implicit representation forms,so that the textbooks can incorporate more cultural contents and richer forms of representation.