A Study Of Cultural Types In The Reading Part Of Junior Middle School English Textbooks Published By Foreign Language Teaching And Research Press

Good cultural awareness helps students to use language correctly and appropriately in intercultural communication,and a good textbook should help to develop students’ intercultural awareness and communication ability.The Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standards(2011)incorporated cultural awareness into one of the five basic goals of English teaching,and required junior high school graduates to reach the fifth level of cultural awareness.In recent years,although the cultural content of English textbooks has been widely studied,these studies are more involved in high school and college textbooks,and relatively less in junior middle school English textbooks.English(New Standard)is one of the most widely used textbooks,but the study of its cultural content is a little deficient,so it is necessary to study its culture.In English class,the content of the reading part of a English textbook is one of the focus for students learning English.Therefore,the author combines the five-level target of cultural awareness of the Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standards(2011),and based on Cheng Xiaotang’s teaching material evaluation theory to evaluate the content of the reading part of English(New Standard).First,the author uses the text analysis method,taking the cultural types mentioned in the five-level goal of cultural consciousness as the standard,and combining the cultural classification model of Cortazzi and Jin,and classifies and summarizes the types of culture contained in the reading part of the English(New Standard),and presents the concrete contents of these types in the textbooks through the form of tables.Then the author conducted a questionnaire survey on the users of this textbook(that is,students in the ninth grade of a middle school in Hohhot)about the cultural content of the reading part of the ninth-grade English(New Standard).Based on the results of the questionnaire,6 English teachers who used this textbook were interviewed,aiming to research the following two questions : 1.What types of cultures are covered in the reading part of the ninth-grade English(New Standard),and do these cultural contents conform the requirements of the five-level cultural awareness target in the Compulsory Education Curriculum Standards(2011)? 2.How do users(students)evaluate the cultural content of the reading part of this textbook?The results of textbook analysis,questionnaire and interview are as follows.First of all,the reading part of the ninth-grade English(New Standard)contains rich cultural types,which generally meet the cultural learning needs and teaching needs of the textbook users(students and teachers).In addition to the cultural types mentioned in the five-level goal of cultural awareness in the new curriculum standard,other cultures such as celebrities,science and technology,lifestyle,norms of behavior,values and so on appear in the textbooks.Secondly,most of the students have a high demand for culture learning,which indicates that students have a great interest in learning culture knowledge.At the same time,most teachers think that the cultural types in the reading part of the textbook are rich and can basically conform their own cultural teaching needs.However,the author has also found some minor deficiencies in the arrangement of some cultural types in the reading of this set of textbooks,some of the cultural types mentioned in the five-level goal of cultural awareness in the new curriculum standard are less frequently or not found in the reading part of this textbook,and the content of mother tongue culture and comparative culture in the textbook is also relatively less.The author also found that there are still a small number of students and teachers for cultural learning and teaching demand is not high,this phenomenon is not conducive to the cultivation of students’ cultural awareness and English learning.This phenomenon is not conducive to the cultivation of students’ cultural awareness and English learning.Finally,the author puts forward some suggestions to teachers’ culture teaching,hoping to help teachers deal with the culture in the reading part of the textbook more scientifically.On the one hand,teachers should deeply understand the goal of five-level cultural consciousness in the new curriculum standard,and through adjusting the cultural content appropriately,let students absorb more abundant cultural knowledge,and meet the students’ learning needs to the greatest extent.On the other hand,teachers need to expand their own cultural knowledge reserves,improve their own cultural literacy,use various teaching methods to stimulate students’ interest in cultural learning,and fundamentally improve students’ demand for cultural learning,so as to cultivate students’ intercultural awareness and communicative competence.