An Analysis On English Key Competences Exhibited In PEP High School English Textbook NSEFC

With the deepening of globalization,international competition has increasingly become the competition of talents,and cultivation of students' key competences has become an international consensus.In 2014,China proposed developing students' key competences through the teaching of various subjects in each school phase.In 2017,the Ministry of Education published English Curriculum Standards for High School,which requires students to form the necessary quality and key competences to adapt to the future development by cultivating their linguistic competence,learning competence,thinking competence and cultural competence.Textbooks are the carrier of teaching,and successful teaching is inseparable from teachers' study and use of textbooks.Therefore,starting from four dimensions of English Key Competences(EKCs),under the framework of activity theory,a content analysis in this study is conducted on the widely used high school English textbooks New Senior English For China(NSEFC),and is triangulated by interviews with eight high school English teachers in Xi'an,to explore the following research questions:(1)Are EKCs exhibited in the high school English textbooks NSEFC? And how are they distributed?(2)What are teachers' perceptions of EKCs in the textbooks when they use NSEFC? Through the content analysis of Warming up,Reading,Learning about Language,Using Language,Summing up,Learning Tip and Reading for Fun modules of the textbooks and interviews with English teachers,it is found that EKCs have been exhibited in NSEFC but with an unbalanced distribution,which is mainly reflected in linguistic competence,quite well in cultural competence but missed in learning and thinking competences.Meanwhile,it is also found that teachers' understanding of EKCs is limited,and less attention is paid in teaching with textbooks so that the deficiencies are not supplemented.Based on the analysis and research results,the researcher provides implications for textbook editors to compile textbooks in terms of EKCs,and for teachers to cultivate students' EKCs by using textbooks creatively.Finally,the researcher summarizes the limitations of this study and puts forward suggestions for future research.