An Analysis Of Cultural Contents In English Textbooks Published By Shandong Education Press From The Perspective Of Intercultural Communication

New Curriculum Standard(2011)puts forwards that language is closely related to culture.English textbooks not only impart knowledge to learners,but also help learners understand Chinese and foreign culture.The contents of the textbooks play an important role in cultivating students cross-culture communicative competence.It further emphasizes the importance of cultural teaching and intercultural awareness and competence.English textbooks published by Shandong Education Press are used in ten cities of three provinces.It’s meaningful to analyze the cultural contents from the perspective of intercultural communication.The paper is based on Byram’s cultural elements theory,Cortazzi&Jin(1999)cultural region classification theory and Byram’s cross-culture communicative competence theory.It studies three questions:(1)Are the cultural elements comprehensive,and what are their proportions?(2)How do the cultural elements distribute,and are their proportions balanced in cultural regions?(3)Are they helpful to improve students’ intercultural communicative competence? To answer these three questions,the study analyzes the textbooks and adopts a questionnaire survey.The results of the study are as follows:(1)The cultural elements are incomprehensive,the sociopolitical element is not involved,the proportions of national history and national geography are low.(2)The distributions of cultural elements in cultural regions are unbalanced except social identity and social group.(3)The textbooks help to promote students’ cross-cultural communicative competence.They have significant effects on improving students’ intercultural attitude and critical cultural awareness,but there is some space to improve the knowledge,interpretation-connection,discovery-interaction skills.According to the findings,the researcher puts forwards suggestions.The editors should optimize the textbooks according to the problems.The teachers should make a flexible adaptation of the textbooks in teaching.