A Corpus-based Evaluation Of Cultural Factors In Two Sets Of English Textbooks For Primary Schools

English Curriculum Standard on Compulsory Education stressed the importance oftraining students’ cross-cultural communication competence and the significance ofcultivating students’ spirits of patriotism (Educational Bureau2011). The fact thatChinese culture and western culture should strike a better balance has beenincreasingly paid great attention.English textbooks for primary schools should reflect the new ideologies so as tocater for the requirements of English Curriculum Standard on CompulsoryEducation. It is through the evaluation of cultural factors in textbooks that we cansee how much importance does a textbook attach to while it is through theevaluation of western cultural factors and Chinese cultural factors that we can findout whether or not a textbook keeps a sound balance between western culture andChinese culture.The present study aims to set up an evaluation framework of cultural factors oftwo sets of English textbooks in primary school. The framework focuses on thedefinition of culture in textbook evaluation, the culture structure as well as acomparatively comprehensive checklist for cultural types in primary Englishtextbook evaluation. It is expected that the evaluation of cultural factors will help todistinguish primary English textbooks that can better reflect the Curriculum fromthose that cannot.The present study systematically introduces the role of textbooks in languageteaching and learning, the definition, purposes and types of textbook evaluation. Italso mainly reviews some foreign criteria of textbook evaluation such asCunningsworth’s (1995), Tomlinson’s (1998) and Adamson’s (2004) and someChinese criteria such as Wang’s (2003), Liu (2004) and Sun’s (2006) which are morecompatible with textbook evaluation in Chinese real situation. This paper alsobriefly reviews the history of textbook evaluation and its tendency of development. The evaluation framework on cultural factors is set up based on Zhao (2002), Liu(2001) and He (2002)’s studies. Evaluating cultural factors with corpus can befeasible if we make cultural-loaded words the subject of study.Two primary school English textbooks are chosen to test the effectiveness ofthe evaluation framework. One is PEP, the other is Join in. Considering the time andenergy, the author chooses two textbooks (PEP4) for grade4from PEP and onetextbook (Join In1) also for grade4from Join in. The present study evaluatescultural factors in two sets of textbooks. The author finds out that cultural-loadedwords, to the largest extent, are nouns or noun phrases. Therefore, this corpus-basedevaluation is conducted based on two mini-corpora including all instrumental textsas well as transcriptions of listening materials. Jclaws is adopted to search all nounsand noun phrases and form lists of word entry and word frequency with the aid ofAntconc3.2.0w. According to the checklist for cultural factors, the author and across-examiner respectively pick out cultural-loaded words. The comparison showsthat the rate of agreement is98%. After those cultural-loaded words are pinneddown, the author designs a questionnaire for30students (15from China and15from abroad) in order to distinguish words with Chinese culture from those withwestern culture and then make sure the final lists of words with Chinese culture andwords with western culture. Finally, according to the checklist for cultural types, theauthor categorizes the words from two lists. And then the author carefully analysisthe results and evaluates cultural factors of the two sets of textbooks.The evaluation result shows that in PEP4, the proportion of cultural-loadedword entry to the total word entry is20.87%; the proportion of cultural-loaded wordfrequency to the total word frequency is17.56%. In Join In1, the proportion ofcultural-loaded word entry to the total word entry is36.62%; the proportion ofcultural-loaded word frequency to the total word frequency is20.55%. It proves thatJoin In1focus more on cultural factors in language teaching and learning. Theproportions of western culture word entry and frequency to culture word entry and frequency are85.38%and94.34%in Join In1, and those in PEP4are67.44%and77.58%. It turns out that Join In1pays much more attention to western culture.However, the proportions of Chinese culture word entry and frequency to cultureword entry and frequency are14.62%and5.66%in Join In1, and those in PEP4are32.56%and22.42%. It indicates that Join In1gives less emphasis on Chineseculture and PEP4emphasized it much. According to the ratio of western culture toChinese culture in PEP4and Join In1, it can be inferred that PEP4is more likelyto keep balance between Chinese culture and western culture than Join In1. As forculture types, there are25types in PEP4and only16types in Join In1. Thisnumber tells that PEP4gives students more opportunity to learn various culturetypes while Join In1gives less chance to them. The evaluation of the two textbooksindicates that PEP4is more in accordance with English Curriculum’s requirement.The result proves that the evaluation criteria can distinguish textbook that is in betteraccordance with the English Curriculum from the one that is not.The present study yields some tentative implications. Firstly, it has set up theevaluation framework of evaluating cultural factors. Secondly, the study has usedcorpus-based method to extract instructional texts that are related to culture. Thesewords may help teachers to evaluate textbooks. Thirdly, the study shows that corpusis a feasible way to evaluate textbooks. Quantitative evaluation on textbooks can bemade through corpus-based approach.