College English Textbooks And Intercultural Communicative Competence

Starting from the 1960s, college English textbooks have undergone four phases in all. In the course of teaching and learning textbooks have played a very important role, for they are the main basis on which teachers conduct their teaching and the main content on which students focus their learning. Textbooks, while keeping a constant supply of language materials, introduce students the cultures of foreign countries and regions, thus making it convenient for students to be familiarized with the cultures of the world and exerting a relatively remarkable influence on the fostering of students'awareness and competence of intercultural communication. Though an increasing number of scholars show their concern for the study of intercultural communication and foreign language teaching, few pay attention to the research of relation between the developments of intercultural communicative competence and textbooks, let alone the relevant empirical study.This paper, based on the theories on textbooks evaluation and intercultural communication, chooses randomly as participants some teachers and undergraduates from some universities in Kunming, Yunnan, and then by adopting Byram's criteria for the evaluation of cultural content in textbooks, and combining the qualitative method with the quantitative method conducts an internal (evaluating the textbooks) and external evaluation (evaluating the textbook users, namely students and teachers) of college English textbooks, especially College English (new edition) (CE) and New Horizon College English (NHCE) now in use, from the angle of contribution to improving intercultural communicative competence, aiming to offer some valuable references to the compilation of the 5th phase of college English textbooks.The results obtained from internal evaluation conducted by this paper indicate:1. that compared with the previous three phases of textbooks, the 4th phase has made greater improvement on the intake of cultural content, styles and types of articles, the selection of language materials as well as the language register; 2. that reviewed from the designing patterns of cultural content, the 4th phase shows the lack of the activities of intercultural communication, that is , the lack of one of factors which are the two parts within the cultural content: the cultural experience through tasks; and3. that observed from the cultural systems visualized in textbooks, the 4th phase displays the lack, or rather, less full presentation, of the matter of history and politics.The results obtained from the external evaluation conducted by this paper indicate:1. that there exists no significant difference between the teachers'overall evaluation of textbooks and students'(CE and NHCE);2. that regardless of ages , educational background, professional titles and having or not the experience of studying abroad, teachers using these two sets of textbooks (CE and NHCE) show no remarkable differences in the overall evaluations of textbooks as well as in the evaluation of the arrangement of the cultural content in textbooks;3. that the longer students learn English, the less satisfied they are with textbooks;4. that the extent to which students are satisfied with textbooks is directly correlated with the teaching methods teachers adopt;5. that teachers as well as students tend to be uniform in the need of cultural content;6. that the evaluation of exercises in textbooks by teachers and students tends to be of uniformity; and7. that as to cultivation of intercultural communicative competence, both teachers and students are inclined to separate cognition from performance.As seen from above, the selections of college English textbooks are more and more characteristic of intercultural acquisition; especially seen from the comparison of the 4th phase with the previous three phases, textbooks have more intake of cultures, and a wider spread of styles and types of articles, in the meantime stressing the selecting of the authentic language materials and the variety of forms and register. However, the 4th phase of textbooks, having based their compilation on the syllabus of 1999, are, seen in the light of today's criteria, out-dated in some of their content and arrangements, thus falling short of the requirements of the era and the 21st-century reform of college English teaching.