Study Of Cultural Content In New Senior English For China

With the development of politics and economy, the association amongdifferent countries is more and more frequent, so the opportunities ofintercultural communication are increasing gradually. At the same time, thecontinuous progress and deepening of the research on foreign languageteaching make more and more researchers and educators realize theimportance of culture in English learning. Language and culture are closelyrelated. Language is the manifestation of culture, and learning a language isconsidered as learning the culture which is reflected by the language. Peopleonly have to comprehend and master abundant cultural connotation whichcontained in the language, they can master a kind of language indeed.Therefore, English teaching in senior high school is not only to cultivatestudents’ foreign language skills, but also to foster their interculturalcommunicative competence. Cultivating students’ cultural awareness is asimportant as cultivating their linguistic knowledge and language skills. Inaddition, at present, textbooks are still the main resources of foreign languagelearning. They provide plenty of learning materials, learning skills, andlearning strategies for students’ foreign language learning, and meanwhile,they also provide scientific teaching theories and teaching methods forteachers’ teaching. Thus, textbook is one of the principal ways to study thecultivation of students’ intercultural communicative competence in seniorEnglish teaching.Adopting literature review, questionnaire and interview, this thesis aimsto study the cultural content in senior English textbook which published byPeople’ Education Press. First of all, it elaborates culture awareness, cultureteaching, textbook evaluation and textbook evaluation criteria systematicallyby collecting and analyzing the existing literature about English culture teaching and textbook evaluation etc.. Next, based on Zhang Hongyan&Zhang Gecheng’s criterion and the Curriculum Standards for Senior English,this thesis classifies and studies the cultural content in New Senior EnglishFor China. The analysis of questionnaires and interviews show that theimportance of culture teaching in English teaching has received recognition tosome extent. However, influenced by college entrance examination, schools,teachers and students pay their attention to learning and training of linguisticknowledge and language skills, and ignore culture teaching. Therefore,students’ cultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence arestill low and need to be further improved. What’s more, the analysis ofcultural content arrangement and presentation forms indicate that there aresome problems existing in cultural content arrangement of New SeniorEnglish For China.This thesis consists of five parts. The first part summarizes some relatedstudies on culture teaching; the second part reviews the theoretical basis; thethird part introduces research methodology explicitly; the fourth part analyzesquestionnaires and interviews; the fifth part is conclusion.