Evaluation Of Cultural Elements Of Textbooks For English Majors

As the implementation of “The Belt and Road”,the connections between countries become closer.The importance of English as a global language has become increasingly prominent,which has put forward new requirements for the teaching of English majors in China.According to the requirements of Syllabus for English Majors in Colleges and Universities,cultivating the ability of cross-cultural communication of students is crucial to English learning.As for English majors,it is important to master enough cultural knowledge from English-speaking countries and Chinese cultural knowledge for language learning.An Integrated English Course(Second Edition),as a textbook commonly used by English majors,plays an important role in improving English majors’ professional ability and comprehensive application ability.Therefore,the content arrangement and compilation of teaching materials should meet the needs of teachers and students for culture teaching and culture learning as much as possible.For this purpose,this thesis takes the An Integrated English Course(Second Edition)as an example to evaluate cultural elements in the textbook for English majors.The paper adopts a combination of internal and external research to study the cultural elements of the textbook.At the level of internal evaluation,the cultural elements in the An Integrated English Course(Second Edition)are classified and analyzed according to Byram’s classification theory of cultural themes.At the level of external evaluation,a questionnaire survey is conducted on teachers and students based on the internal evaluation of the textbook,and a descriptive analysis is made by SPSS 22.0.Meantime,by collecting the feedback of cultural teaching and textbooks via questionnaire,suggestions for future cultural teaching and textbook compilation are put forward.The analytical results suggest that: firstly,An Integrated English Course(Second Edition)basically covers 8 cultural themes proposed by Byram,but some topics such as social interaction,social and political institution are less involved in the textbook.Secondly,cultural elements in the textbook are close to students’ daily life,authentic and diverse,but the content of Chinese culture and comparative culture is relatively deficient,which is not conducive to broaden students’ cross-culture view.Thirdly,both English major students and teachers hope more cultural background knowledge,culture types and cultural elements from other countries and pop culture can be added in the textbook.In general,the cultural elements in An Integrated English Course(Second Edition)can meet the requirements of syllabus,which contributes to improving English majors’ intercultural communicative competence and comprehensive quality.Based on the analytical result,the author recommends increasing the content of cultural knowledge in the classroom,and setting up an appropriate evaluation mechanism to obtain feedback from students in time in the future cultural teaching;at the same time,extracurricular activities about culture should be actively carried out to make up for deficiency of the traditional culture teaching in the classroom and textbooks.As for the textbook compilation,the balance of various cultural themes should be adjusted;the proportion of cultural comparison in the textbook should be increased;the content of intercultural communication should be increased in order to promote the sustainable development of cultural teaching in theory and practice and enhance students’ ability of intercultural communication.