A Study On The Evaluation Of The Cultural Presupposition Of Target Language In College English Coursebooks

The College English teaching and learning plays an important role in higher education in China, and it is connected with the future of non-English major students. After sixty years of development, the college English has got notable achievement, but it also has many disadvantages. Teaching material itself is one of the most important influential factors of English teaching besides teaching methodology, the quality of teachers, course design, and individual factors of students.With the development of college English, the cultural issues become more seriously day by day. And how to evaluate the cultural topics of the materials, how to improve students'knowledge of cultural presupposition, their sensitivity of culture and their ability of cross-cultural pragmatic communication, and how to develop students'cultural awareness become more and more important in today's material evaluation.The New Horizon College English (Reading and Writing) (The Second Edition) was selected as the research material in this thesis. And based on the theories and criteria of teaching material evaluation and the theories of cultural presupposition in translation, especially the cultural presupposition classifications of Ke Ping and the design of cross-cultural presupposition classifications of Hu Meixin, the author built the theoretical framework of teaching material evaluation of the present study. After the investigation of 25 teachers and 298 students who came from Lanzhou City Academy and Gansu University of Political Science and Law by the ways of questionnaire and interview and the statistics of SPSS, the author got the advantages and disadvantages of the cultural presupposition design in the set of New Horizon College English and the teaching and learning situation. As for the disadvantages of the course books, the author also gave the suggestions of the future compilation of materials and college English teaching and learning.The major findings of the present study were: the cultural presupposition was designed more rationally and the four categories of cultural presupposition of Ke ping were all be involved in in the set of New Horizon College English (Reading and Writing) (The Second Edition), but the explanations and the exercises and activities of cultural presupposition were obviously inadequate; teachers and students had certain cultural awareness of pragmatic presupposition, cross-cultural pragmatic presupposition and cultural presupposition, and they also knew something about cultural presupposition of target language; although most teachers and students had high expectation on the teaching and learning of cultural presupposition, some students could not master the cultural presupposition information well because of the factors of numerous disadvantage.In the end, the author hoped that the cultural information and activities should be designed more rationally and more attention should be paid to the interest of material users because of the explicit requirements of culture in College English Curriculum Requirements and the strong expectation of teachers and students.Of course, there are some limitations in the present study. For example, because the research instruments were designed by the author himself, although the pilot-test and the improvement had already been carried out, some inevitable problems of reliability and validity still existed; and the lack of the analysis of the other kinds of materials except the papery course books and CD-ROM. The author also hopes that the latter researches could be more reasonably comprehensive.