Chinese Cultural Distribution In English Textbooks In Senior High School

It is known that English has been increasingly used as an international language following along with the advancement of globalization.English users are from different cultural backgrounds.In other words,World Englishes context is multicultural.Meanwhile,with the rapid development of Chinese economic development and elevation to the status of an emerging power,frequent international communication for Chinese is nowadays quite common.In the cross-cultural communication,Chinese culture is the important content.However,there has actually been an appearance of Chinese Culture Aphasia during the cross-cultural communication.English learners and users in China have difficulty in expressing Chinese culture in English.Therefore,Chinese Culture Aphasia has received an increasing amount of attention in English language teaching for many years.As textbooks are the main source of English teaching materials,this study aims to explore whether the deficiency of Chinese culture in EFL textbooks is in debt to this Chinese Culture Aphasia to some degree.Considering the cognitive competence of students and the curriculum requirements for culture,the author naturally chooses two full sets of English textbooks New Senior English for China(NSEC),published by People's Education Press,and New Standard English(NSE),published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press as the research objects.The quantitative and qualitative methods are applied into the data collection and data analysis.The major research questions include:(1)What is the correlation between Chinese Culture Aphasia and English textbooks?(2)What is the distribution of cultures about the Inner Circle,the Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle in NSE and NSEC?(3)What is the distribution of Chinese culture in NSE and NSEC respectively?(4)What categories of Chinese culture are presented in NSE and NSEC?The author investigates the distribution of cultures in these two sets of senior high school English textbooks with Kachru's Three Concentric Circles Theory(1985)and Byram's classification criteria for textbooks evaluation(1993).The key findings show that:(1)The deficiency of Chinese culture in English textbooks is the main reason for Chinese Culture Aphasia.(2)Distribution of culture in the Inner Circle,the Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle in NSE and NSEC is quite unbalanced.(3)The amount of Chinese culture in NSE and NSEC accounts for a small proportion in reading section.(4)Only seven categories of Chinese culture are presented in NSE and NSEC and the proportion of different cultural elements are uneven.The results of the research show that the uneven distribution of Chinese culture in English textbooks leads to the deficient input of home culture.As a result,Chinese Culture Aphasia emerges in English teaching.This research contributes to an understanding of Chinese Culture Aphasia from the perspective of teaching materials and proposes a new perspective for the combination of English and Chinese culture.Practical suggestions for future design of English textbooks and teaching are also put forward.