A Comparative Study On The Cultural Content In Project English And Go For It

Nowadays,cultural differences brought about by deepening globalization have made new demands on students' cross-cultural ability,and foreign language teaching has paid more and more attention to the cultivation of students' intercultural communicative competence.In 2011,the Ministry of Education promulgated the English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2011)to incorporate cultural awareness into one of the five basic goals of foreign language teaching,and whether the existing textbooks contain well-structured systems is the key to achieving the goal.Therefore,this paper conducts a comparative analysis on cultural content of Go For It(henceforth GF1)and Project English(henceforth PE),trying to answer the following questions:1)What are the sources of cultural contents in GFI and PE?2)What is the distribution of cultural content in GFI and PEP?3)How is the cultural content presented in GFI and PE?so as to find out the advantages and possible disadvantages to offer suggestions for textbook writers and provide reference for teachers in culture teaching.According to the level five objectives of cultural consciousness in the new English Curriculum Standards,and cultural classification proposed by Cortazzi and Jin,combined with the classification of big culture and small culture,the paper divides the cultural content which should be included in the teaching material into four categories:lifestyle and behavior norms,traditional and local customs,national history and geography,values and literature and art.At the same time,each kind of culture was categorized into target culture,native culture and international culture.The research results are as follows.First of all,both GFI and PE focus on the input of the target culture,but also take into account the native culture and international culture.PE puts relatively more emphasis on cultural diversity and cultural contrast.GF1 involves less cultural content about national geography and history,and PE version is lack of cultural content about behavior norms and national history.Secondly,both GFI and PE have a spiral progression of cultural content.Distribution of cultural content in GFI increases with different grades while there is not much difference of cultural quantity in each book of PE.The general distribution in terms of four kinds of cultures starts from simple content to more informal content with many repetitions in GFI and PE.And there also exists imbalance and the distribution is not systematic in two sets of textbooks.Lastly,the two sets of teaching materials are knowledge-oriented with much dialogues and passages to present cultural content.PE pays much attention to the usage of pictures.Authentic materials are relatively inadequate in both sets of textbooks,but GFI uses more ways than PE.Also,notes in GFI are more helpful for communication.According to the above results,it is suggested that the writers of GFI and PE focus more on the diversification of cultural sources and increase proportion of native culture,international culture and historical and geographical facts in particular.They should emphasize more on systematic and coherent distribution of cultural content,and pay attention to the communication-oriented ways of presentation.Teachers should have a wide knowledge of different culture and fully understand the teaching materials so as to make proper adjustments and supplements,and use more extracurricular resources and audio-visual aids to help promote cultural teaching.