A Comparative Study Of The Cultural Contents And The Presentation Of These Contents In English Textbooks Used In China's And Japan's Junior High School

China and Japan are close neighbor countries, similarities do not only exist in cultural backgrounds and geography conditions but also in foreign language education.When entering the 21st century, both countries face the similar question that how can we allocate various kinds of culture in English textbooks under the multicultural background. Because of this, some researchers paid attention to the cultural contents in Japan's English textbooks. However, the researches on comparative analysis of cultural contents and presentation of these contents in China's and Japan's English textbooks are rare to find. For this reason, English (Yilin edition) and New Crown English Series are chosen to be the research objects in this study.Content analysis, documentary review and comparative analysis will be adopted in this study. The analysis of cultural contents will be conducted from the following aspects: 1) the source of culture. Cortazzi and Jin's theory (1999) is applied which includes the target culture, source culture and international culture, besides comparative culture is added to make this model more appropriate for this study; 2) the themes of culture. Based on Hendon's classification of culture (Hendon,1980),Chen's (2004)and Lee's (2009) concepts on the related themes are adopted to detecting the themes of culture with a capital "C" and culture with a small "c" in the two sets of textbooks;3)the ratio of traditional culture. Besides, the presentation of these cultural contents will be discussed as well. All of these are attempting to answer the following research questions:1. What cultural contents are included in these two sets of textbooks, and how do they present these contents'?2. What are the similarities and differences between the two sets of textbooks in selection and presentation of cultural contents?3. What similarities and differences can be found between Japan's Edzucation Guiding Essentials and English Curriczulum Standards for Compulsory Education (2011 version)?From the results of the analysis, it is obvious that both sets of textbooks put culture into a prominent position. However, the differences between these textbooks can be found in the allocation of cultural contents and forms of presenting these contents.English (Yilin edition) focuses on the target culture while source culture is paid more attention in New Crown English Series. Besides, the different ratio of international culture in these textbooks reflects textbook compilers, different opinion on English.With the emphasis on target culture, compilers of English (Yilin edition) prefer to treat English as the mother tongue of people who come from the target language countries such as America, Britain, Australia and so on. But with the increasing ratio of international culture in New Crown English Series we can find these compilers prefer to regard English as a lingual franca which is used between people who speak different language and have different cultural background. Compared with Neiw Crown English Series, the ratio of traditional culture is not enough in English (Yilin edition) and most of them are concentrated in 9B, the last textbook in this set which only has four units.As to the way of presenting cultural contents, English (Yilin edition) chooses activities to present cultural contents while New Crown English Series prefers to use pictures to help students have a direct image about the cultural contents.