A Comparative Study On The Cultural Content In The Junior High School English Textbooks Of PEP And FLTRP

Cultivating students’ cultural awareness and intercultural communication ability is not only a requirement of The English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2011),but also a requirement of the development of the age.Language and culture are inseparable,and there is no doubt that they cannot be separated in English education.English textbooks play an important role in English teaching,they are not only the prime learning materials for students,but also the crucial teaching tools for teachers.The cultural content carried by the textbook affects the effect of students’ cultural knowledge learning and the cultivation of their cultural awareness because of different arrangement and presentation.Shandong Province,as a large education province in status,has many versions of English textbooks in junior high schools,and the cultural content in each version is different.It is especially important to choose a textbook with a reasonable design.Two sets of junior high school English textbooks(two sets of textbooks selected in this article both belong to three-year system,namely seventh,eighth and ninth grade),one by People’s Education Press(hereafter referred to as PEP)and the other by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press(hereafter referred to as FLTRP),are chosen as the object of comparison in this research.The intercultural communication theory and the cultural scheme theory are used as the theoretical basis.The literature method,comparative analysis method and text analysis method are adopted to systematically compare the cultural content in the two junior high school English textbooks.The research questions are designed as follows:(1)From a macro perspective,what are the similarities and differences in the overall arrangement and presentation of cultural content of the two sets of textbooks?(2)From a micro perspective,what are the similarities and differences in the sources,cultural types,and epochal character of cultural content of the two sets of textbooks?The results are as follows:(1)From a macro perspective,in terms of overall arrangement and presentation,the lack of cultural expansion and the emphasis on conversations and reading materials have led to a relatively insufficient amount of cultural content in PEP.Also,the ignorance of context in the presentation of unit topics has caused the fragmentation of cultural presentation of the content.The FLTRP are rich in knowledge about cultural expansion,its reading texts are sufficient,the main topic of the module is accompanied by two secondary topics,and the whole textbooks have fixed roles and contexts.(2)From a micro perspective,in terms of sources,the PEP has too many cultural content with unknown backgrounds,occupying half of all,resulting in a decrease in the total proportion of target language culture and native culture content,especially with less native culture,which is not helpful to establishing a student-oriented China cultural self-confidence;In terms of cultural types,both sets of textbooks in behavioral culture,social culture and conceptual culture account for a small proportion of the content;In terms of the epochal character of culture,in comparison,the PEP involves insufficient contemporary cultural content and does not cover a wide range.Both sets of textbooks should select and provide excellent contemporary cultural content from different fields.The lack of contemporary cultural content is not conducive to the update of students’ cultural knowledge structure.Based on the above research conclusions,some relevant suggestions for textbook compilers and teachers are put forward,hoping to provide more references for the selection and arrangement of the content of junior high school English textbooks.