A Corpus-based Comparison Of Cultural Elements Between Primary School English Textbooks In Mainland China And Hong Kong

Language teaching and learning is inseparable from cultural elements.Since age has a great impact on the rate and order of language acquisition of learners,it is necessary to evaluate what cultural elements are taught and how in primary schools.Textbooks,as the main learning resource in class,play an important role in instructing and learning cultures.Therefore,textbooks evaluation is of great relevance considering that appropriate teaching materials serve as a prerequisite for successful teaching in class.This study aims to evaluate and compare the proportions of what cultural elements are presented and how they are presented in two widely-used series of primary English textbooks in Mainland China and Hong Kong.The two series are Primary English published by Beijing Publishing House Group and Longman Welcome to English published by Pearson Education.The presentation of cultural elements is evaluated and analyzed by applying two evaluation frameworks based on Martin Cortazzi&Lixian Jin' s classification of cultural types,Ka-Ming Yuan' s classification of cultural elements and Ping Shi's and Xiaowei Wu's theories for analyzing structures of textbooks.The corpus processing tools "Free CLAWS web tagger" and AntConc 3.2.4w are applied to collect the data.Research examiners are invited and questionnaires are used to guarantee the reliability of the study.Both the analytical approach and the contrastive approach are employed to analyze and compare the cultural elements and their presentation.It is found that the proportions of different types of cultures and different categories of cultural elements are unbalanced in both series.Specifically,English culture accounts for a higher proportion than Chinese culture in both series except for BJ 6.International culture occupies an insignificant proportion(less than 10%)in both series.On the other hand,although cultural elements of all the four categories tend to increase from Grade One to Six in both series,the proportions of cultural elements of products,practices and especially perspectives are lower than that of persons.The research also indicates that the lessons in Primary English and the chapters in Longman Welcome to English both include cultural elements throughout the external structure of the textbook.From the perspective of internal structure,the proportion of cultural elements presented separately in Longman Welcome to English is higher than that in Primary English.Besides,the proportion of cultural elements presented with pictures decreases from BJ 1 to BJ 6 and from HK 1 to HK 6.This study is of significance in the following aspects.Firstly,it suggests that researchers can have more access to references when evaluating existing teaching materials.Secondly,textbook compilers in both Mainland China and Hong Kong are supposed to learn from each other when updating existing English textbooks and designing new ones.In addition,school authorities and teachers can learn about a textbook before adopting it for class teaching and use some supplementary materials and proper teaching methods to enhance learners' competence of intercultural communication.