Research On The Native Culture In China’s College English Textbooks

In recent years, culture teaching in college English teaching has been drawnmore and more attention because of the requirement of improving college students’intercultural communicative competence. As one of the criteria of evaluatingintercultural communicative competence, the input of native culture should beattached great importance to. Thus it is very meaningful to make a research of thenative culture in college English textbooks which are the main materials of cultureinput.Under the guidance of theories of culture teaching, intercultural communicationas well as textbook evaluation, this research uses quantitative and contrastive methodsto research the native culture in China’s current10types of “Twelfth Five-year Plan”college English textbooks, including New Standard College English. This researchcounts and analyzes the number of passages related to target language’s culture, nativeculture, international culture, comparative culture and other countries’ cultures inorder to highlight the quantity of passages related to native culture. Besides, thisresearch classifies the native cultures into different culture themes in terms ofByram’s and Niu Xinsheng’s classifications of culture theme and makes a statisticalstudy by the use of SPSS. Meanwhile,303students and30teachers are investigatedby questionnaires to reflect their native culture awareness, culture theme preferencesand culture theme expectations on textbook compilation and to check whether users’evaluations of textbooks’ native culture distribution are in accordance with the resultsof textbooks’ native culture distribution.The textbook researches show that among the total848passages which are in the“Twelfth Five-year Plan” college English textbooks, there are only28passagesintroducing native culture. This number is far less than that of target language’sculture or international culture. Besides, culture themes of those native cultures arenot equally distributed and are different from students’ culture theme preferences.According to the results of questionnaires, users generally have high native cultureawareness and their feedbacks of culture distribution in the book they use are inaccordance with the results of textbook research, that is, the number of passagesrelated to native culture is very little. In addition, most of the students like culturesrelated to social interactions. It is not in accordance with textbooks’ culturedistribution. Thus, not only most of students but also most of teachers think that native cultures should be properly added into the college English textbooks andstudents’ cultural theme preferences should be taken into consideration appropriately.Making a research of native culture in college English textbooks provides a referencefor compilers to compile more suitable college English textbooks which can improvestudents’ intercultural communicative competence and provides suggestions for nativeculture teaching in English classes.