Comparative Analysis Of The Cultural Contents In Reading Materials Of Senior High School English Textbooks Of New Senior English For China And New Standard English

Developing students' English subject core competences is one of the important measures to deepen the reform of English curriculum in basic education.English subject core competences includes four parts: linguistic competence,cultural awareness,thinking quality and learning abilities.On the premise of English subject core competence,cultural awareness is included in cultural character,which is the basis of forming students' cultural character.Cultural character is the expansion and sublimation of cultural awareness and the ultimate goal of cultivating students' cultural awareness.Language learning and cultural learning are closely related,English curriculum should combine them closely in educational practice.We should understand the teaching contents of foreign language courses and cultivate students' cultural awareness from the cultural standpoint.Starting from the analysis of textbooks,this study mainly focuses on the cultural awareness in the English subject core competence,which chooses two kind of English textbooks(book1-5)as the research objects: New Senior English for China published by People's Education Press and New Standard English published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.They will be called NSEFC and NSE for short respectively in this paper.It will elaborate on what content on the textbooks' reading section reflects the cultivation of students' cultural awareness.This paper is going to explore the overall distribution of the cultural content of the reading section in NSEFC and NSE,and whether it meets the requirements for the cultivation of the English subject core competences in English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School(2017);The categories of the cultural items in the two versions of the textbook and how it affect the cultivating the students' cultural awareness.Through this study,it is found that the cultural contents of senior high School English textbooks is rich in topics,which basically meets the training requirements of the new curriculum standard(2017).The cultural contents of the reading materials are mainly occupied by spiritual culture.The proportion of knowledge culture,behavioral culture and psychological culture in the spiritual culture level is larger than the others cultural items.The proportion of mode of thinking,aesthetic sentiment and religious belief is relatively small,and the introduction of institutional culture is seriously inadequate.On the regional structure of cultural content,the target-language culture accounts for a large proportion in NSEFC,on the contrary,it is not very large in NSE.It is hoped that this study will provide some suggestions for the compilation,development and utilization of reading materials in senior high school English textbooks in the future.