A Comparative Study On Cultural Contents In English Textbooks Of Senior High School Between China And Japan

With the rapid development of economic globalization,cross-cultural exchanges have become more and more frequent.Cultivating learners’ cultural awareness and improving their cross-cultural communication skills have become one of the main tasks of English education.As the main source of cultural input,textbooks play an important role in the process of English teaching.In recent years,more and more scholars have conducted studies on the cultural content in textbooks.By combing the relevant studies on the cultural content of high school English textbooks at home and abroad,it can be found that in Chinese English textbooks,compared with the target culture,the mother tongue culture is insufficient.Besides,the textbooks contain a wide range of cultural content,but some topics are scarce in general.At the same time,the deficiencies of the existing studies are also revealed.Most of the previous studies focus only on reading materials and neglect the cultural content in output modules.In addition,there is a lack of comparison between English textbooks used in different countries.This research takes two sets of high school English textbooks,namely NSEFC series published by People’s Publishing House of China and All Aboard series published by Tokyo Books,as the research objects.Focusing on the three types of cultural regions,it compares the cultural content contained in the two sets of textbooks from the perspectives of cultural breadth,depth,and input-output distribution.First,according to the classification framework of Cortazzi & Jin(1999),culture is divided into source culture,target culture,and international culture.Through comparison of the frequency of each cultural region,it can be concluded whether the teaching materials can reflect the status of English as an international language(breadth).Secondly,based on the classification framework of Allen &Valette(1977)and Ovando & Collier(1985),the number of cultural themes,namely big C culture and small c culture under each cultural region is counted so as to reveal to what extent each cultural region is described(depth).Among them,big C culture always refers to cultural themes closely related to the achievements of human civilization,including history and geography,achievements in science and technology,architecture,philosophy,literature and art,politics and economy,education,language and characters,music and sports,and celebrities.Small c culture describes cultural themes that are inseparable from daily life,including food,festivals,lifestyles,customs,values,linguistic communication,and body language.At the same time,this study counts the distribution of each cultural region in the input and output modules.The research found that in terms of the distribution of cultural regions,the proportions of all cultures in All Aboard and NSEFC series are quite similar.However,compared to All Aboard,in NSEFC textbooks,the native language culture is more distributed in other sections other than the reading section.With regard to the distribution of cultural themes,All Aboard and NSEFC both show preference to culture with a big C,and neither of the two textbooks cover all the cultural topics under the big C culture and the small c culture.In addition,both of them ignore the introduction of subjective aspects of small c culture.What’s more,from the perspective of the distribution of cultural content in the input and output modules,NSEFC is seriously lacking in culture output,especially under the categorization of target culture and international culture.In comparison,in All Aboard series,culture is more balanced in the distribution of input and output.Based on the findings above,several suggestions for the compilation of Chinese senior high school English textbooks are given.Firstly,adjust the distribution of cultural regions in the textbooks,that is,add articles related to native culture in the reading section,and correspondingly assign more content related to target culture and international culture to other sections such as the post-reading exercises so as to improve the efficiency of native culture learning.Secondly,make a balance between the distribution of big C culture and small C culture.Thirdly,strengthen culture output,and at the same time,provide relevant English expressions and cultural information for students to refer to,trying to realize the organic combination of culture input and output.