A Comparative Study On The Cultural Contents In Pep Edition And Beijing Normal University Edition New Senior High School English Textbooks

Under the background of economic globalization,China's “The Belt and Road(B&R)” initiative and the trend of internationalization of education and cultural diversification put forward new requirements on foreign language teaching.The English curriculum standards for ordinary senior high schools(2017)issued by the Ministry of Education in 2018 set the goal of cultivating cultural awareness for English teaching in high schools.Under the new changes of national strategy,world situation and educational policies,the new version of English textbooks for senior high schools will also be gradually used in all provinces and cities from 2019 to 2022.The textbooks are the concrete embodiment of the national will in the field of education and the bridge connecting the new curriculum standards of the ministry of education with the actual classroom teaching.The cultural contents of English textbooks for senior high schools is not only material for language learning,but also an information window to help students appreciate the similarities and differences of multi-culture in the world and enhance their cultural understanding.In the process of intercultural communication,students not only require learning the cultural background of the target language,but also need to master the multicultural background.The unfamiliar cultural contents in the new edition of the ordinary high school English textbooks pose challenges for English teachers and students.Therefore,the evaluation of the new textbooks is particularly essential.In this research,two sets of the most widely used compulsory high school English textbooks,2019 new edition of New Senior English for China(NSEFC)and Senior High English published by Beijing Normal University(BSDYY),are selected as the research subjects.This research based on the perspective of cultivating students' multicultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence,takes the 2017 new curriculum standards as the standard,takes the three concentric circles theory,intercultural communication theory and input & output theory as the framework.This research adopts the literature method,the text analysis method and comparative analysis method to analyze the cultural contents from the following four research questions:(1)What are the characteristics of the two sets of textbooks in the selection of cultural types?(2)What are the distribution characteristics in the two sets of textbooks in cultural diversity and international?(3)What are the characteristics of the types and proportion of cultural thematic contexts in the two sets of textbooks?(4)What are the characteristics of the distribution and arrangement of the two sets of textbooks in the cultural input(listening,reading,viewing)and cultural output(speaking,writing,presentation,practice)? The major findings of this research are as follows:(1)In terms of cultural types,both of them are mainly focusing on knowledge culture and ignore communicative culture from a macro perspective.From the micro-level,the NSEFC attaches importance to the Chinese culture and the culture of the expanding circle countries.The BSDYY attaches importance to the culture of the target language,multicultural differences and universal culture.(2)In terms of cultural diversity and cultural internationality,the themes and countries involved in the NSEFC are more than the BSDYY,so it is more culturally diverse and international.(3)In terms of thematic contexts,both of them account for the largest proportion of the “Human and Society” thematic context.The cultural themes of NSEFC are more abundant but mostly belong to the surface material culture;the cultural themes of the BSDYY are fewer,but they pay attention to citing the classics,the contents involved in most of the themes belongs to the deep spiritual culture with the function of value orientation.(4)In terms of cultural input and output,the NSEFC takes listening as the primary way of cultural input and speaking as the main way of cultural output.The BSDYY uses reading as the main way of cultural input and exercises as the primary way of cultural output.In addition,the NSEFC emphasizes “cultural input”,while the BSDYY emphasizes “cultural output”.Finally,based on the above findings,the author puts forward the following suggestions for teachers,textbook editors and education departments on the problems existing in the cultural content arrangement of NSEFC and BSDYY:(1)High school English teachers should learn new culture teaching theories,such as “continuation task”,“production-oriented approach(POA)”,“multicultural comparative analysis” and “cultural lead-in.” At the same time,teachers need to carry out targeted and differentiated immediate evaluation on students' cultural output.(2)The editors should first know the latest teaching theories,SLA theories and learning motivation theories at home and abroad.Secondly,editors should do an excellent job of “combination of editing,teaching and research”.Then pay more attention to major national strategies and economic and trade policies,and increase the cultural contents of countries that have economic and trade cooperation with China.Finally,the textbook should add the module of case analysis of intercultural communication errors.(3)The Education Department needs to strengthen the comprehensiveness,typicality,and scientificity of the thematic contexts when revising new curriculum standards,so as to provide guidance to editors.Textbook evaluation department for the cultural factors and value orientation of textbooks can be added.Intercultural communication competitions,such as “Tell about five thousand years of the Chinese nation in English” and “Around the world”,can be held in high school.