Evaluation And Analysis Of Cultural Contents In New High School English Textbooks Published By Beijing Normal University Press

Under the background of globalization,exchanges between countries have become more frequent.The development of the society has put forward new requirements for the cultivation of talents.Therefore,the ability of international understanding and the ability of cross-cultural communication have become indispensable qualities for modern citizens.The New Curriculum Standards(2017 Edition)proposes to cultivate students’ cultural awareness.Textbook,the main carrier of realizing the objectives of English subject,connects the curriculum standards with the real classroom practice.As the main medium of transmitting cultural knowledge and language knowledge,textbooks are of great significance to cultivate students’ cultural awareness.The cultural content in the textbook directly affects the input of students’ cultural knowledge and has a profound impact on the cultivation of students’cultural awareness.This study is based on the cultural classification and the requirements of cultural content of the New Curriculum Standards,combined with the regional cultural classification to classify and evaluate the content of the compulsory and the optional compulsory textbooks.The author tries to answer the following questions through literature analysis,text analysis,contrast analysis and questionnaire:(1)What cultural knowledge is selected in compulsory high school English textbooks and optional compulsory English textbooks published by Beijing Normal University Press?And how is it distributed.(2)Is cultural content in compulsory textbooks and optional compulsory textbooks published by BNUP in consistent with the requirements of cultural knowledge in the New Curriculum Standards(2017)?(3)What are students’ attitudes towards cultural content in textbooks?This study uses the textbook evaluation method that combines internal evaluation and external evaluation proposed by Professor Cheng Xiaotang of Beijing Normal University to analyze and evaluate the cultural content of the three compulsory textbooks and four optional compulsory textbooks.Internal evaluation mainly classifies the cultural content of the compulsory and optional compulsory English textbooks and compares it with the requirements of the New Curriculum Standards.External Evaluation is carried out in the form of questionnaire.It is conducted among two classes of junior students in a high school in Beijing to find out whether the cultural content in the textbook meets the students’ learning needs.Based on the research and evaluations,the following conclusions have been drawn:(1)In terms of cultural types,both the compulsory textbooks and optional compulsory textbooks focus on spiritual culture.However,neither of them involves philosophy-related topics.(2)In terms of regional culture,both textbooks focus on common culture,target culture and contrast culture,while the world culture is less involved.Compared with compulsory textbooks,the proportion of Chinese culture in optional compulsory textbooks has declined.(3)In terms of thematic context,both textbooks focus on the culture context of"human and society".The breadth and depth of the thematic context are increasing.(4)The compulsory and optional compulsory English textbooks have diverse cultural types,rich themes,which basically meet the requirements of cultural knowledge of the New Curriculum Standards.(5)According to the questionnaire,students believe that the timeliness and interesting of the cultural content in the textbooks need to be improved.In addition,the world culture is less involved.Based on the above results,the author puts forward the following suggestions:Teachers should improve their own cultural literacy,select and add certain cultural content on the basis of English textbooks.New network resources can be used actively with the combination of traditional teaching resources.For students,after making clear their cultural learning goals and needs,they should achieve their learning goals through textbooks with the help of teachers and other learning resources.In order to improve the cultural content of textbooks,textbook editors need to consider cultural diversity when compiling textbooks,add a certain world culture,and use multiple methods to increase the interesting of the cultural content of textbooks.