A Cultural Analysis Of Secondary Vocational English Textbook From The Perspective Of Intercultural Communication

The Higher Education Press published the new English syllabus for the secondary vocational school in 2009.One of the tasks of the English course is to cultivate students' cultural awareness and improve their cultural literacy.The teaching syllabus of secondary vocational schools mentions that “guide students to understand cultural differences between China and the West and be able to communicate effectively in English in different life and work situations".It can be seen that the cultivation of students' intercultural communication competence has been directly related to the overall goal of the English curriculum.However,as China's vocational education has been in a "late start and slow development" situation for a long time,the level of secondary vocational education is generally lower than that of ordinary education and there are still many problems in English teaching in secondary vocational education.As the main basis of English teaching and the main carrier of teaching content,English textbooks are the issues that English teachers are most concerned about in teaching practice and the quality of teaching is uniformly guaranteed.Moreover,as the main input source of vocational high school students' English learning,whether the input materials in the teaching materials are comprehensible,interesting and sufficient,has a certain impact on the students' intercultural communication competence.Based on the evaluation of textbooks and related theories of cultural teaching,this thesis analyzes the listening and reading input materials in the textbook of English(Basic Modules 1-3)for higher vocational education from the perspective of cultural types and cultural regions,and objectively evaluates the textbooks' cultural characteristics.Subsequently,it explains the use of textbook users(teachers and students)in the actual teaching and the evaluation of the set of textbooks,and puts forward suggestions on the revision of textbooks and how to effectively use textbooks in cultural teaching for textbook users.The questions to be answered in this paper are as follows:(1)What cultural content is included in the reading and listening part of the secondary vocational school English textbook and how do they distribute?(2)How do the users(teachers and students)think about the cultivation of intercultural communication competence? How do the users view the cultural contents of this textbook? What are their suggestions on the improvement of this textbook?The research finds that:(1)According to Byram's cultural types and Cortazzi & Jin's cultural regional classification,the cultural types and regional distribution of reading and listening input materials in English textbooks for higher education editions are not well balanced.Socialization and life cycle,Belief and behavior,National history account for the vast majority.In addition,the number of world culture and target culture is more,but the distribution of native culture is less.(2)According to the results of questionnaires and interviews,firstly,teahers and students have already developed a certain awareness of intercultural communication.Secondly,the cultural contents of teaching materials are not close to real life.Thirdly,teachers and students generally believe that cultural contents should be interesting,creative and life-like.In view of the cultural distribution characteristics of the input materials in English(basic module 1-3)and the suggestions put forward by the users of the teaching materials,the author believes that the culture contents should be enriched firstly.On the premise of ensuring the input amount of the target language,textbook need to add more representative and wide-ranging world cultures.The content of native culture should also be appropriately increased to balance the proportion so as to enhance students' national pride and confidence.Teachers should learn to make good use of the intercultural contents of textbooks and adopt multiple teaching methods to increase the intercultural context.Students should continuously accumulate a variety of cultural knowledge to improve their intercultural communication competence.