A Study On The Cultural Contents Of New Standard English

The importance of culture teaching has been widely acknowledged by English teaching circle. At the beginning of the new century, the Ministry of Education issued Curriculum Standards for Senior English (CSSE,2003), which considered cultural awareness as one of the five objectives in senior English teaching. It focused on improving learners' communicative capability and cultivating their consciousness of different cultures.As a bridge between the target language and the learners, textbooks are seen as a major resource in cultural acquisition. This paper tried to study the cultivation of cultural awareness based on New Standard English (NSE,2005) which was published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.The present study mainly studies three parts:The first part is the investigation and analysis of cultural contents in Book 1-Book 5 of NSE (2005), including preface, texts and exercises. The second part is the survey of participants including the attitudes to culture learning, evaluations of the contents of NSE (2005) and the effect of them in cultural awareness cultivation as well as the assessments to culture teaching. The third part is studying the effect of the textbook on cultural awareness in culture teaching. Textbook analysis and questionnaire survey are adopted as the major research method, while classroom observation is used for further explanations. Qualitative study and quantitative study are adopted in textbook analysis and questionnaire survey.The results indicate that (1) Cultural contents touch a wide coverage of cultural items which related with social life closely, and meet the cultural awareness goals in CSSE (2003) basically. However the amount of cultural contrast is little. (2) Participants are satisfied with the cultural components of textbook generally, but do not confident of the effect of them, which related with the arrangements of cultural components and current culture teaching. (3) The cultural contents of NSE (2005) are not so effective in improving learners'cultural awareness as a result of large amount of cultural items, insufficient cultural exercises and complexity of linguistic knowledge. (4) Current English teaching which influence by the traditional mode of English teaching greatly hampered the cultural awareness cultivation based on NSE (2005).Based on the above conclusions, the improvement of the cultural contents of NSE (2005) and culture teaching is discussed. First, writers of the textbook should balance the relationship between language and culture. More cultural exercises and cultural contrast are required. In addition, opportunities for advanced professional development should be provided by administrators in order to enrich teachers' cultural knowledge and improve culture teaching methodologies. Finally, cultural contents should be included in test.The present study hopes to offer some advices for future textbook editors and assist teachers and students in daily English teaching and learning. However, further research is still desired to make the textbook evaluation concerned with cultural contents more mature.