An Analysis Of English Textbookfrom The Prospective Of Intercultural Communication

English is the medium of negotiations, trade, science and technology, and tourism around the world. However, owing to the various cultural backgrounds, people often make mistakes, resulting in the failure of communication. The main reason is that people ignore the carrier of language-- culture, in the process of communication.Cultural Awareness has been listed as one of the teaching objectives in the New Curriculum Standard(2003). This change has been also reflected in English textbooks at once. This paper studies the obligatory English book of high school, published by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press( Sichuan Province Special, 2004). The culture design in English textbook will be analyzed through two research questions.Question 1, Do the presentation and layout of cultural types help to raise students’ awareness of intercultural communication ?Question 2, Does cultural input match cultural output of various regions in listening, speaking, reading, writing, cultural corner and task activities ?This paper mainly adopts the qualitative and quantitative method. Firstly, based on the New Curriculum Standard(2003), the percentage of the cultural types will be counted on account of the material culture, spiritual culture, social culture, behavior culture. Secondly, based on Kachru’s Three Circles of English(the Inner Circle,the Outer Circle,the Extending Circle), the culture in textbook is divided into the local culture, target culture, world culture and integrated culture, the proportion of cultural input and cultural output will be counted in different areas. Lastly, the form of the Excel is to be analyzed cultural activities in the textbook.The findings are as follows:(1) Different cultural types are presented in the textbook of FLTRP, but the percentage of cultural types is unbalanced. For example, the percentage of the spiritual culture is 37%, the social culture is 30%, the material culture is 17%,but the behavior culture and conceptual culture is quite few, 10% and 7% respectively.(2) The cultural input and cultural output of various regions are mismatch.Obviously, the proportion of the local culture’s output(54.36%) is far greater than the input(22.88%), the target culture’s input(47.06%) is far greater than the output(19.44%), the world culture’s input(24.19%) is also greater than the output(3.70%). But the integrated culture is just the opposite of the world culture, the percent of the output(20.38%) is greater than the input(5.23%).Therefore, recommendations are made for textbook compilers and teachers in view of the problems in the last chapter of the paper.Textbook compilers should expand the cultural content of the behavior culture and conceptual culture.Besides,they also should balance the proportion of the local culture and the target culture in the input and output activities.In addition,teachers should pay more attention to the cultural teaching in foreign language teaching.