A Comparative Research On Cultural Representation Of Senior High School English Textbooks Based On Multicultural Theory

Culture is very important in language teaching and learning,and it is one of the important components of any language textbook(Tajaddin &Teimournezhad,2014).Therefore,a good understanding of the language has a great relationship with language learners’ conscious understanding of the cultural background of the target language.The General Senior High School Curriculum Standards(2017 edition and revised in 2020)puts cultural awareness as one of the core competencies of English subjects,which makes clear requirements for the arrangement of cultural knowledge in textbooks.Textbook is an important basis for teaching and learning and a carrier of cultural information to transmit.With the continuous updating of curriculum standards,the cultural content of textbooks is more comprehensive and richer.Textbook research has attracted more and more attention from researchers at home and abroad over the decades.However,the classification of cultural content in textbook analysis at home and abroad is diverse and complicated,and there is a lack of a comprehensive,unified and standardized framework.Basing on the above research background,this paper is based on the multicultural theory,and describes the contents and forms of cultural representation of the textbooks published by PEP and Yilin according to the General Senior High School Curriculum Stands(2017edition and revised in 2020),aiming at comparing the overall situation of the cultural representation of the two editions of textbooks and verifying the cultural representation framework through the textbooks published by PEP and Yilin,and to verify the applicability of the cultural representation framework.The research specifically explores the following three research questions:(1)What is the overall situation of the contents of cultural representation of senior high school English textbooks published by People’s Education Press and Yilin Press? And what are the differences?(2)What is the overall situation of the forms of cultural representation of senior high school English textbooks published by People’s Education Press and Yilin Press? And what are the differences?(3)Why is there such a difference between the two types of textbooks in terms of the cultural representation? In order to answer the above questions,the author adopts a mixed research method combining quantitative and qualitative research.Based on the framework of the content of cultural representation and the form of cultural representation of Zhang and Li(2020),starting from the category of country and cultural category of the content of cultural representation;the explicit and implicit of the form of cultural representation,taking Required Courses Book(1-3)and Required Elective Courses Book(1-4)in two editions of English textbooks as the research objects,this paper makes statistics on the contents and forms of cultural representation of 14 books.Then the collected data are analyzed by Excel and SPSS.27.0.1.After analysis,the results show that:(1)In terms of the content of cultural representation,both the PEP and YL Edition have the highest frequency of “shared culture” and the lowest frequency of “international culture”.In terms of cultural categories,the “cultural practice” of the textbooks published by PEP has the highest frequency,the “cultural products” published by YL Edition have the highest frequency,and the“cultural communities” of both have the lowest frequency.There are significant differences in the content of cultural representation between PEP and YL Edition.The specific difference is that the proportion of“shared culture” and “cultural products” in YL Edition is higher than that in PEP,but the frequency distribution of the content of cultural representation in PEP is more balanced than that in YL Edition.(2)In the forms of cultural representation,from the aspect of explicit,both the PEP version and the YL version have the highest frequency of the “only cultural items fully discuss text”,while the PEP version has the lowest frequency of the “main culture item and minor culture item in the Cultural Knowledge section”;The lowest frequency of YL edition textbooks is “evenly-distributed cultural items in the Cultural knowledge section”.From the aspect of implicit,the most frequently appeared version of PEP is the “cultural items in language exercises”,while YL version is the “cultural items in exercises that entail understanding of cultures(understanding cultures)”.PEP and YL Edition account for a low proportion of multi-cultural aspects in the exercises,which makes the two editions of textbooks have the problems of single cultural category and lack of multi-cultural comparison.There are significant differences between the two editions of textbooks in the representation of explicit culture,and the biggest difference is “main cultural item in the Cultural Knowledge section”.(3)The main reasons for the above differences are:(1)Principles and ideas of compiling textbooks;(2)Regional differences in the use of textbooks;(3)The degree of implementation of curriculum standards in textbooks;(4)The overall design form of textbooks.By comparing and analyzing the contents and forms of cultural representation in the two editions of textbooks,the author fully realizes that the compilers should not only pay attention to the cultural content,but also pay attention to the hidden cultural content in the exercise,and further expand and reorganize the cultural representation of the textbooks according to the curriculum standards reasonably,so as to give full play to the advantages of the textbooks and make up for the shortcomings of the textbooks.More importantly,teachers should pay equal attention to the cultural content in the textbook texts and exercises,fully understand the cultural representation of new senior high school English textbooks,so as to properly and fully use the textbooks,which can better cultivate students’ cultural awareness,broaden the horizons of students from different regions and backgrounds,help students establish correct cultural concepts,tolerate and understand multiculturalism,so as to establish students’ cultural self-confidence and make them consciously spread and carry forward China culture.