On The Treatment Of Culture-Related Content In College EFL Textbook

Intercultural Communicative Competence (henceforth ICC) has now been widely accepted as the aim of EFL teaching in most countries. Since textbook is the main source for EFL teaching, it is necessary to give enough consideration to ICC in textbook compiling. This is especially true for China. On the one hand, Chinese language and culture is the media for communication in China; on the other hand, due to the Chinese educational system, college EFL teaching is conducted under one national syllabus, and only a few series of textbooks are used in the universities and colleges all over the country. As a result any deficiency in the textbook would cause nationwide bad effects. At the same time, the goals of college EFL education may differ from those of elementary and secondary education.This paper first discusses the aim of the culture-related content in college English textbooks. It is found that 1) college EFL textbooks should aim at students' growth as a human and enhancing their ICC, especially development of their critical competence to comprehend, evaluate and incorporate target culture and native culture; 2) college EFL textbooks should facilitate the teaching and learning of target culture from knowledge, behavioral and attitudinal dimensions; 3) development of awareness of stereotypes and learner autonomy should receive enough attention in textbook compiling. 4) language and culture teaching should be integrated in textbooks.Then surveys are conducted on the cultural content of one series of textbooks--College English (New), 2001 (henceforth CE (new)), which is now widely used in college English teaching in China. The surveys are conducted at three aspects: 1) examination of culture-related content in the textbooks and Teacher's Books themselves; 2) in-use comment on the culture-related content of CE (new) from teachers and students; and 3) culture related needs analysis of teachers and students. The results indicate that 1) CE (new) is generally American-oriented and multicultural aspect was neglected; 2) there is no explicit cultural thread in CE (new); 3) CE (new) mainly aims at linguistic objectives and lacks double-perspective of the target & native nations. 4) CE (new) lacks awareness of stereotypes, and more author's points of view on the perspectives of the texts should be added; 5) Most teachers and students are not satisfied with the culture-related content in CE (new); 6) Both teachers and students deem linguistic objectives more important than cultural objectives and they tend to define culture learning in terms of knowledge dimension instead of the acquisition of ICC, and behavioral dimension and attitudinal dimension of culture learning are rather neglected; 7) Teachers and students lack awareness of the bad effects of stereotypes. On the basis of these findings the improvement of the culture-related content of CE (new) are discussed. It is hoped that the study will provide textbook editors with useful criticism, suggestions and reference.