Analysis Of College English Textbooks Based On Cross-cultural Sensitivity Illustrated By The Example Of New Horizon College English-Reading And Writing Course

In the process of language learning,culture is vital to learners,and directly influences the improvement of students’ comprehensive cultural quality.Today’s world is a multicultural world.With the international communication,economic globalization and information technology,profound changes have happened in the field of cultural values in China.Developing learners’ cross-cultural sensitivity is a essential objective of English teaching and learning."College English Curriculum Requirements" issued in 2007 is explicitly stated that English curriculum should improve students’ comprehensive ability of using English language,including cross-cultural communication and learning strategy,improving the students’ comprehensive cultural quality,to meet the demand of social development and international communication.Therefore,as the main basis of teaching activities,teaching materials should pay attention to the improvement of students’ cross-cultural sensitivity while passing on language knowledge,and training talents with intercultural communication competence."New Horizon College English" has been updated in three versions since the beginning of 2001."New Horizon College English-Reading and Writing Course" is most widely used in non-English majors in collage and popular with teachers and students at its extensive topics,new contents,and diverse culture.There is less specialized research on cultural themes in English teaching materials.Byram textbook evaluation system focus on the cultural content of the textbook.It divides cultural themes into eight categories to evaluate the cultural themes in textbooks.This thesis employed Byram’s eight-dimensional categorization for cultural themes as text analysis method to analyze the textbooks’ culture parts.It mainly contained two aspects: type classification and type structure and layout.From these analyses the author concluded that content of western culture in the textbook is authentic and contemporary,and the western culture is introduced to the students objectively and truthfully.However,the inadequacies still exist in the design of the textbook’s western culture-related content: the textbooks contain eight categories of cultural themes,but the content of the cultural theme is unbalanced;The Lack of the matter of politics and literature topics;Lack of the matter of comparative culture;And in terms of cross-cultural communication,overemphasizing American culture is unfavorable for the learning of complete culture system.Overall,the selection and design of western cultural content in New Horizon College English showed some consideration for the comprehensive development of ability,developing non-English major students’ cross-cultural sensitivity.However,certain aspects still needs further improvement.According to the results of the research,some suggestion for the choice and arrangement of cultural content in collage English text book are proposed in the end of the paper,Furthermore,some suggestion is induced for the editors and teachers of teaching materials,in order to enhance the function of English materials to developing learners’ cross-cultural sensitivity and make a reference to follow-up study.