Evaluation On The Textbooks-Business English(A Comprehensive Course)from The Perspective Of Intercultural Competence Cultivation

Communication between different cultural groups is becoming increasingly frequent.And intercultural competence becomes one of the core factors in realizing successful intercultural interaction.To cultivate intercultural competence,language teaching classroom turns out to be an indispensable venue and textbooks are the most influential tools in intercultural competence development in the teaching context.Intercultural competence is especially important for people engaging in intercultural business.And Business English major is meant to cultivate talents with both excellent language skills and a thorough understanding of both Chinese culture and foreign culture for future intercultural business interaction.Therefore,language textbooks for students majoring in Business English shall be of effects in cultivating intercultural competence.In this thesis,the textbooks—Business English(A Comprehensive Course)are selected as research objects for the reason that this set of textbooks is chosen as the learning materials for students in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in the first four semesters.The high proportion in the teaching schedule marks their importance in developing students‘ competence.What‘s more,with the preface of the textbooks claiming that they have the goal of strengthening students‘ cultural know-how for the purpose of improving students‘ intercultural competence in order to facilitate their future international business practice,the evaluation on their efficacy in developing intercultural competence is carried out in the research.The goal of this research is to find out how this set of textbooks develops students‘ intercultural competence and what suggestions can be put forward for the revision of the textbooks.To reach the goal of this research,Byram‘s theory on evaluation of intercultural competence in language teaching and Cheng‘s theory of internal and external evaluation theory on textbooks are employed.Through internal evaluation,textbooks are analyzed in a detailed way in terms of four dimensions(Knowledge,Attitude,Skills and Critical cultural awareness)that consist of intercultural competence.Through external evaluation,feedback from students and teachers towards the efficacy of the textbooks in nurturing intercultural competence is collected through questionnaires.In view of that reading passages and text materials in the exercises are closely connected with knowledge dimension and tasks play the main role in delivering content concerning skills,attitude and critical awareness dimensions,two scales are designed to collect students‘ and teachers‘ feedback,with one designed to collect textbooks users‘ feedback towards knowledge dimension and the other towards skills,attitude and critical cultural awareness dimension.By comparing the results from internal evaluation with results from external evaluation,the findings and suggestions can be seen as follows.Generally speaking,results from internal evaluation show that editors of the textbooks indeed take intercultural competence cultivation as one of their goals.Moreover,feedback from students and teachers also shows that the textbooks can indeed help develop students‘ intercultural competence to some extent.However,some suggestions can still be made for their revision.Firstly,the importance of Chinese culture is not well emphasized in the set of textbooks.It is highly advisable that more reading passages concerning Chinese cultural knowledge are edited into the textbooks.Secondly,through data from students‘ feedback,it is found that students think highly of their learning in knowledge about stereotypes and identity of a country.However,data from internal evaluation show that the textbooks have low coverage in this category of knowledge.The reason lies in that teachers add abundant supplementary materials for knowledge concerning this respect in classroom teaching.So it is suggested that more passages and text materials concerning stereotype and identity of a country shall be introduced in the textbooks,so that teachers can use the materials in textbooks directly to design their teaching activities in a more convenient way.Thirdly,according to internal evaluation,textbooks have a high portion of knowledge concerning national history.However,teachers and students do not think the textbooks are useful enough to enrich students‘ cultural knowledge of this category.Observed from the textbooks,national history can be found mostly in ?Notes? part,which is an easily ignorable part for students and teachers.Thus,it is advised that more passages with subject of national history are designed so that students will focus more attention on learning knowledge about national history.Fourthly,attitude is the precondition for successful intercultural interaction,and critical cultural awareness strengthens skills and complicates attitudes,which helps develop students‘ intercultural competence in a more complicated way and deeper level.However,compared to skills dimension,tasks concerning attitude and critical cultural awareness cultivation are presented inadequately in the textbooks.Therefore,to cultivate intercultural competence in a more comprehensive way,more tasks shall be designed to cultivate students‘ intercultural competence in terms of attitude and critical cultural awareness.Theoretically,this research contributes a bit to the vacancy of the field of Business English textbooks evaluation.Moreover,this thesis provides a possible framework for assessing English language textbooks in terms of their intercultural competence cultivation.This thesis may also invite scholars trying to assess language textbooks to ponder on their ability to promote IC development in EFL teaching and learning,which may be a new perspective for research in textbooks evaluation.Practically,this research may help improve the design of the set of textbooks and may give some hints for the future compilation of similar Business English textbooks.