A Study Of Cultural Content In PEP Junior High School English Textbooks

With the increasing trend of global integration,cultural exchanges and cultural awareness training are getting more and more important in modern English teaching.As an important resource and carrier for English teaching,the arrangement and richness of cultural content in English textbooks will profoundly influence the cultivation of students’ cultural awareness.Therefore,study of the cultural content of junior high school English textbooks is of great significance for cultivating students to understand diverse cultures and spread Chinese culture to the world.In order to explore the cultural content in junior high school English textbooks,and offer feasible suggestions for the textbook compilation and English teaching,this study selects the textbooks published by the People’s Education Edition(PEP for short)as the research subject,based on the English Curriculum Standards,Cortazzi and Jin’s cultural classification theory,intercultural communication theory,Cheng Xiaotang’s textbook evaluation theory and text analysis method analyzes the cultural content of the textbooks,adopts questionnaire and interview to investigate the evaluation of the textbooks by teachers and students,and attempts to answer the following questions:1)What are the characteristics of cultural content in the PEP junior high school English textbooks?2)What aspects of cultivating cultural awareness does the cultural content of the PEP junior high school English textbooks focus on?3)How do teachers and students evaluate cultural teaching and the cultural content of the textbooks in practice?It is found that:1)The cultural content characteristics of the textbooks are as follows: the arrangement of cultural content is proper with abundant illustrations,which conforms to the scientific principle in the Cheng Xiaotang’s evaluation theory and the cognitive level of students.There is abundant cultural content in the textbooks,covering history and geography,traditional custom,lifestyle and manner,literature and art,and value mentioned in the English Curriculum Standards,while themes of them are uneven,and the themes of literature and art are less distributed.There is extensive and diversified regional cultural content,but the source culture is insufficient.2)The cultural content in the textbooks focuses on cultivating cultural awareness from three aspects: cultural cognition,cultural attitude and cultural behavior.3)With regards to the evaluation of cultural teaching,most students identify with teachers’ cultural teaching.Some teachers and students think that the cultural content is rich but the content of history and literature is not enough.In addition,when making suggestions,teachers emphasize that cultural content should be in line with the actual life of students and appropriately increase the proportion of source cultural content in the textbooks.This study is beneficial for English teachers to deal with the cultural content in textbooks more scientifically,and helps to promote students’ cultural learning,and fundamentally improve students’ cultural awareness.