Evaluating English Textbooks From The Perspective Of Intercultural Communicative Competence

Nowadays,with the increasing frequency of cross-cultural communication in China,the continuous development of the nation and the society has a higher demand on the language competence of the contemporary foreign language learners.The essence task of foreign language learning is not only to learn the knowledge of a language system,but also to grasp certain intercultural communicative skills.The purpose of this study is to take the 1-5 modules of New Senior English for China(hereinafter referred to as"NSEFC")by People's Education Press as the research object from the perspective of intercultural communicative competence(hereinafter referred to as ICC).Based on the current situation of foreign language teaching and learning of ICC,the requirements of the syllabus of English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School issued by the Ministry of Education,and the experience and lessons learned from the previous researches and theoretical bases of the textbook evaluation,this paper sets out to comprehensively analyze and evaluate the contents of students' English textbooks to test whether they meet the relevant requirements of the target items of ICC training in the curriculum standards.In this paper,literature review and text analysis are used to carry out the overall analysis and evaluation of the materials in the English textbooks.The systematic content analysis shows that the PEP High School English Teaching Materials generally meet the requirements of the English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School in teaching intercultural knowledge and improving the intercultural understanding to senior high school students.More specifically,the cultivation of ICC is displayed in the design of the text and the activities involved,but there are certain deficiencies in the cultivation and development of ICC in different dimensions.The teaching contents and the activities of the textbooks focus on teaching students' intercultural knowledge and attitudes instead of cultivating intercultural skills and the students' cross-cultural awareness of critical thinking.On the whole,this set of textbooks has some limitations on the cultivation of students' ICC.The NSEFC series takes account of the need to develop ICC in text and task designs while they give divergent weight to each dimension of ICC.Based on the above findings,this paper puts forward some suggestions on how to improve the material items of the ICC in English textbooks for senior high school students through the systemic text analysis of the research process.