Evaluating Cultural Content In New Century College English From The Perspective Of Intcrcultural Foreign Language Teaching

Nowadays, the culture teaching has played an increasingly important role inlanguage instruction. In the Requirement for College English Curriculum issued by thenational Ministry of Education in2007, intercultural communicative competence isincluded among the objectives for language teaching, which establishes a new targetand direction for English education in both theoretical development and teachingpractice. Widely used for College English course, New Century College English(NCCE), a set of textbooks, is worthwhile to be analyzed and examined for the sake ofintercultural language teaching.On the basis of the theories on textbooks evaluation (focus on cultural content) andintercultural communication, this paper chooses some teachers and undergraduates fromHubei University of Technology randomly as subjects, and with the guidance of ZhangHongling’s ideas of cultural aspects in the evaluation of cultural content, the authorconducted an internal evaluation to the cultural content of NCCE by analyzing itscomponents from the following aspects, including internationality and interculturality,presentation of macro culture, presentation of micro culture, optional classroomactivities, rotation of culture themes and authenticity. Sequentially, a quantitative studyon the views of teachers and students was conducted as an external evaluation, in whichtwo questionnaires designed by Castro et al were employed to collect the views of theteachers and students about cultural content in NCCE. Finally, SPSS13.0was used toanalyze the data from the two questionnaires.The findings of the internal evaluation of NCCE indicate:1) the set of textbooks is American-culture-oriented;2) there is cultural diversity in NCCE, but the cultural content of politics and historyis relatively inadequate;3) NCCE lacks in the native cultural content.The findings of the external evaluation of NCCE indicate:1) most teachers and students are not satisfied with the cultural content in NCCE;2) they attach more importance to linguistic objectives than cultural objectives;3) they view cultural learning just in knowledge dimension, neglecting culturallearning in term of behavioral dimension and attitudinal dimension. This paper consists of5parts. Part1is the introduction of the research. Part2provides the theoretical basis to the research by introducing theories about culture,culture teaching and textbook evaluation. Part3is about the methodology of theresearch. Part4is the internal and external evaluation of NCCE. The last part is theconclusion.