A Shift In Cultural Orientation Underlying The Distribution Of English And Chinese Names In English Textbooks: A Comparative Study Of English(1982)& Go For It(2003,2012)

For foreign researchers,their focuses of textbook evaluation are on problems encountered in their actual use;domestic textbook evaluators approach a textbook from different aspects or compare two or more textbooks published within a particular period.It is rare to evaluate different versions or editions of one and the same textbook or the different textbooks in different periods,without which it would be hard to tell how changes in English textbooks respond to social changes in China.This thesis examines the three sets of textbooks---English(1982)& Go for It(2003,2012)in the light of the theory of culture of learning,seeking to figure out whether there is a shift in cultural orientation in English textbooks in the past thirty years.Taking Go for It(2003)as the point of reference,the paper first analyzes the distribution of English and Chinese names,then looks closely at their related cultural topics in the reading materials,and compares the preceding findings with the relevant contents in English(1982)and Go for It(2013).The research results are as follows:(1)There is a roughly correspondence between the names and the related cultural topics,that is,the English names concerning the western social life and school life,and the Chinese names concerning the life of Chinese-speaking people;(2)In the reading materials of the three sets of textbooks,the percentage of the English names is,generally,higher than that of Chinese names,but the use of Chinese names have been on the increase,when more topics concerning life and traditions of Chinese people are involved;(3)The topics related to names are mainly about social life and school life;the topics related toleisure and material life,gradually rising in the past thirty years,have been brought closer to the learner's daily life,while at the same time the topics of western customs or folklores have been curtailed,hence their percentage in decline;(4)Based on the comparison of the cultural topics related to Chinese and English names,the textbook materials appear to be undergoing a shift from looking outward(Anglo or Western culture)to looking inward(Chinese culture),or from target culture to source culture.