A Study Of Cultural Themes In Textbooks For English Majors

The appearance of cultural turn theory not only sheds light on translation but also has a great influence on foreign language teaching and research. Since then, cultural teaching has drawn more and more attention of both teachers and students. The researches concerning culture teaching are not only about the teaching theories, but also about the textbook content and the textbook modality. Under this background, this thesis aims to look into the distribution of the cultural themes in one of the widely used series of the English textbooks in China, namely the Contemporary College English (Second Edition) (CCE), a series of textbooks that published by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press with Yang Limin as the chief editor.This study combines the methods of qualitative research and quantitative research to investigate the distribution of the cultural themes in CCE,the target users’ cultural expectations, cultural theme preference and the relationship between cultural theme preference and learning motivation. This thesis is based upon the theories of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC). It employs Byram’s eight-dimensional classification for cultural themes to classify the cultural themes in CCE. In the meantime, through questionnaire and interview, this study also investigates target users’ expectations and preference for the seven dimensions of cultural themes covered in CCE; with the data collected by interview and a vocabulary test, the author tries to find out whether their preference for cultural themes motivates their language learning. Upon her findings, the author puts forward her views and suggestions on the future textbook compilation in term of cultural themes.The investigation subjects in this study are 120 students and 6 teachers,they are the CCE users in Foreign Languages College, Guangxi University. The instruments of the study are the questionnaires, the outlined interview for the teachers and students, the vocabulary test and the statistical software SPSS 19.0.The results of the this study can be concluded as follows:First, the cultural themes distribution in CCE is relatively comprehensive. It covers all the other seven cultural themes listed in Byram’s cultural classification with different percentages except the theme of social interaction. Next, both the students and teachers prefer those cultural themes that are interesting, enlightening and close to their daily life, such as the belief & behavior, socialization & life cycle. Last but not least, students’ preference for the cultural theme reflecting in the text can motivate their autonomous learning.