An Evaluation Of The Cultural Contents To PEP New Senior English For China From The Intercultural Perspective

In order to cater to the communication of globalization and diversification, the Ministry of Education promulgated the New Curriculum Standard of English (2003), proposing initially "cultural awareness" should be regarded as one of the five curriculum standards, namely language knowledge, language skills, learning strategies, emotional attitude and cultural awareness. Textbook is the main source of learning English for senior high school students. On the basis of this, the author thinks that the evaluation of the cultural contents to PEP New Senior English for China (NSEFC) from the intercultural perspective can provide us with new ideas and methods in the reformation of English teaching and learning in senior high schools.According to Zhang Gecheng and Zhang Hongyan’s classification to the cultural contents of teaching materials, the thesis aims to analyze and describe the cultural contents of NSEFC from the five perspectives, namely target culture, native culture, world culture, cultural contrast, and other cultural components. In addition, the aspects such as the cultural awareness of teaching material users, cultural contents of teaching materials, culture teaching and the influence of culture teaching, are explored by means of interview and questionnaire survey. The participants in the survey include 472 students in Grade 2 and Grade 3 in Huaiji First Senior High School and Huaiji Senior High School, and 132 English teachers from Guangdong province, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and other provinces.The research questions of the thesis are listed as follows:1.What cultures are contained in the textbooks? 2. Can the cultural contents of the textbooks meet the requirements of the New Curriculum Standards? 3. What are the attitudes of both teachers and students towards the cultural contents in the textbooks?The research results show that:First of all, the textbooks encompass target culture, native culture, world culture, cultural contrast, and other cultural components, which are, however, unreasonably distributed in them. Among these cultures, target culture and other cultural components account for 31.67% and 30% respectively, native culture accounts for 18.33%. World culture and cultural contrast account for 12.5% and 7.5% respectively. Second, although most of cultural contents of the textbooks are able to meet the requirements of New Curriculum Standard, some are irrelevant to the students’ daily life, which to some extent makes them fail to meet students’ needs in culture learning. Third, most of the teachers and students are interested in the cultural contents in the textbooks.According to the results of this research, it is suggested in the thesis that more cultural contents of other English speaking countries should be properly added in the textbooks, the proportion of world culture and cultural contrast should be increased, and the cultural contents relevant to students’ daily life should also be supplemented.