Realization Of Culture Teaching Through English Textbooks

With the globalization of the world, intercultural communication has become more and more important. A good command of a foreign language not only means mastering the language itself, but also involves the cultivation of intercultural communicative competence. Learning material, one of the most important elements in language teaching, plays a very significant role in this aspect. Nowadays most college English textbook writers in China realize the importance of culture in English language teaching (ELT) and have tried to incorporate the idea of intercultural communicative competence into the textbooks, but there still exist some problems yet to be solved. This thesis aims to find a good way to improve culture teaching through textbooks in CET, to make textbooks do more service to CET, and to make students achieve the purpose of language learning, culture learning and intercultural communicative competence.In order to investigate students'intercultural communicative competence and to investigate whether the widely used College English (New Edition) provides students with adequate social-culture knowledge, two researches—a textbook evaluation and a social-culture test are conducted. The social-culture test by means of a questionnaire is conducted among 200 non-English major students in Harbin Institute of Technology. It was found that students'intercultural communication competence is not satisfactory and there is much room for improvement in developing good college English textbooks. Thus, the author attempts to construct a framework for culture teaching through college English textbooks in terms of teaching goals, contents, and criteria.