Cultural Concerns And Teaching Strategies In Senior High School English Textbooks

Language is the main media of cultural communication. In the globalized world,cultural exchange becomes more and more frequent and deepening, and cross cultural education has attracted extensive attention from wild circles. To cultivate talents with intercultural communication competence, the situation of traditional language teaching needs changing. Foreign language learning should combine with cultural learning, and language learning materials should contain rich and varied cultural information. As a national language, English language learning should combine with cultural knowledge learning, and English textbooks should also cover a wealth of cultural knowledge. The High School English Curriculum Standard published in 2003 which clearly puts forward that cultivating cultural awareness should be an English curriculum objective. It marks a great step of Chinese foreign language teaching reformation. In order to respond to the cultivating requirement of cultural awareness, new version of high school English textbook published by the Chongqing University Press(CQUP) has made some improvements in selection and edit of cultural content by comparing with the old version. And the new version textbook will help students to learn cultural knowledge and improve their intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence.The research methods of this thesis are documentary method and textual analysis.Through consulting and analyzing relative cultural studies, cross cultural studies and English cultural teaching strategy studies which have made a solid theoretical foundation for analyzing textbook’s cultural content and putting forward cultural teaching strategies.The thesis aims to answer those questions:(1) What cultural elements are there in the new version of CQUP textbooks?(2) Whether the cultural setting of the new version textbooks conforms to the requirements of the curriculum standard?(3) What are the relative teaching suggestions of cultural content of the textbooks?Through analyzing the reading materials of 5 required textbooks, the author has got3 conclusions:(1) The cultural contents of new-version almost include all kinds ofaspect of social and historical culture, such as interpersonal relations and values,entertainment and leisure, food and clothing, health and clothing, historical figures and literary arts, travel, geography and popular science knowledge, festivals and customs.(2)The cultural setting of these English textbooks basically meets the curriculum requirements.(3) Cultural teaching strategies suggestion, such as cultural thematic training, cultural comparison training, and cross cultural communication training which can make the cultural teaching more specific, scientific and also contributes to cultivate student’s cross-cultural awareness and cross-cultural communication ability.