A Comparative Study Of Interdisciplinary Content In Senior High School English Textbooks

The word “interdiscipline” firstly appeared in America in 1920 s.It means breaking the barriers between different disciplines and doing some educational and scientific activities that involve two or more than two disciplines.As an important carrier of educational and scientific activities,the interdisciplinary content of teaching materials can efficiently promote the integration of different knowledge under the condition of satisfying students' interest.The National Curriculum Standard for Compulsory Senior English requires that English teaching materials should be helpful to broaden students' horizon and thinking.The content of English teaching materials should be closely connected with students' life and provide them with authentic language materials.Therefore,the interdisciplinary content of English teaching material is significant for students' development.Most researches of the interdiscipline at home focused on the university stage,while many other scholars have focused on the implementation of the new curriculum,the relationship between teachers and students,teachers' roles and other aspects in the basic education field since the new curriculum reform started.Articles about interdisciplinary learning and teaching at the basic education stage are extremely rare.Even if there are a few articles,they mainly discuss interdiscipline from the overall education,so they can not guide English teaching directly.For this reason,this thesis compares senior high school English textbooks(1-5)of the Beijing Normal University edition with that of the Oxford University edition from thestandpoint of interdisciplinary content by quantitative and qualitative analysis.The objectives of the analysis include the topic and the content of each module.The research questions are listed as follows:1.How many modules with obvious discipline oriented topics do the Beijing Normal University edition and the Oxford University edition have respectively? What disciplines are involved? What are the percentages of these disciplines?2.What disciplines are involved in the same topic in the two editions? What are the percentages of these disciplines?3.Which edition is richer in terms of its interdisciplinary content?After comparing and analyzing,the researcher comes to the conclusion: From the aspect of discipline oriented module topics,the Oxford University edition contains more interdisciplinary content than the Beijing Normal University edition.From the aspect of disciplines involved in the same module,the Oxford University edition contains more interdisciplinary content than the Beijing Normal University edition for the number of disciplines involved in its content and its discipline span.Finally,the researcher gives some suggestions for textbook writers,schools and teachers to promote English interdisciplinary teaching reform and improve students' English use ability.