An Analysis Of The Cultural Content In Senior English Textbooks (NSE):from The Perspective Of Intercultural Instruction

In recent years, much attention has been paid to cultural-based language teaching in foreign language study. This thesis carried out within this backgroud aims to explore the cultural content of New Standard English which is widely used in Chinese senior high middle schools;The theoretical foundations of this thesis are theories of cultural-based teaching and the theories of textbook evaluation. The thesis also quotes Byram’s eight categories of cultural content to evaluate the distribution of cultural content in NSE. Byram’s eight categorizations are social identity and social group, belief and behavior, social interaction, social and political institutions, socialization and the life cycle, stereotypes and national identity, national history and national geography. This paper also uses questionnaires to evaluate students’and teachers’ cultural awareness and cultural expectations, and to investigate their preferences of the eight categories in NSE. At last, the author tries to match the results of users’cultural attitude and the selection of cultural content in NSE together to provide some useful suggestions for future textbook development in practice.Subjects participated in this research include300students and32teachers from Changtu First Senior High Middle School and Changtu Fourth Senior High Middle School. The subjects are selected carefully to make sure the validity of this research. The instrument of this thesis is questionnaire.Descriptive analysis of statistics collected from users’questionnaires is conducted in this thesis. Then a matching analysis is made of users’cultural expectations and cultural content in NSE on the basis of descriptive statistics.The following conclusions are achieved through this investigation:first, the cultural content in NSE is distributed relatively reasonable and balanced, containing all the eight categories of Byram’s classification. Topics related to social life win great popularity among textbook users. Second, both teachers and students possess relatively high cultural awareness and cultural expectation. They all regard culture as an important part of foreign language learning. But they do not really achieve the real cultural-based language learning in practice. It is suggested that we should pay more attention to this phenomenon. Third, both teachers and students are all familiar with the cultural content in NSE. They all give their positive comments to this research. Both of them like the texts related to social life best. At last, the textbook writers should take the users’cultural attitude and the course syllabus into consideration in the future textbook development. The basic principles of an English textbook are that students can develop their intercultural communicative competence and their language ability at the same time.The originalities of this research are that it combines the qualitative and quantitative approach to explore the cultural content in NSE. Based upon this analysis, the author builds a bridge between the textbook users’ cultural expectations and textbook evaluation. The selection of cultural content in an English textbook is of great importance for students to improve their intercultural communicative competence.