| With the reform and open policy,China has more interaction with the world and the cultural communication has become more and more frequent and important.There is an increasing demand for talents with intercultural communicative competence.A large number of scholars and educators has realized the importance of culture knowledge in the English teaching and learning,the demands and objectives about intercultural communication are written in the New Curriculum Standards for senior high school(2017)(shortened as New Curriculum Standards)as well.In recent years,a big amount of scholars have studied the cultural knowledge in different versions of textbook or in the new version and the old version of the same textbook.However,there are few papers discussing about the cultural elements in the reading passages of the compulsory and optional textbooks of New Senior English for China(shortened as NSEC).Therefore,the author is going to research,based on the New Curriculum Standards and textbook evaluation method proposed by Cheng Xiaotang,the cultural elements in the reading passages of the compulsory and optional textbooks of NSEC.As for the internal evaluation,it is to research the cultural contents in the reading passages of NSEC with qualitative and quantitative study.As for the external evaluation,some students and teachers are asked to fill out questionnaires in order to know their suggestions and advice for the NSEC.The research is to answerthe question:Do the cultural elements in the reading passages of the compulsory and optional textbooks of New Senior English for China meet the objectives in the New Curriculum Standard?If not,what part is absent ?The result shows:(1)There are fundamental cultural elements in the reading passages of NSEC.However,the percentage of contrastive culture is comparatively low and the philosophical culture is even not included.(2)The whole series of textbooks(book1-10)meet most of the cultural objectives given in the New Curriculum Standard except the English Media,English people’s behavior and western countries’ diplomacy.(3)The results of the questionnaires show that a lot of teachers and students think the reading passages in NSEC is out-dated and the cultural knowledge is not profound.After the research,the author gives the following suggestions:(1)improve the teachers’ cultural awareness and knowledge;choose the proper textbooks;choose and use teaching materials more reasonably;cultivate students’ cultural confidence;(2)add multicultural contents;add contrastive cultural contents;choose reading materials from the students’ real life to make it more interesting.It is hoped that this research can be useful and helpful to develop and design the cultural contents for the teachers and editors of the textbooks. |
