Contrastive Analysis Of The Cultural Content In Senior High School English Textbooks

The paper has conducted a contrastive analysis of cultural content in senior high school Englishtextbooks. A qualitative and quantitative blended method is adopted in this study. The study is meant toaddress the following questions:1) How are the cultural factors distributed in different sets of English textbooks?2) How are the cultural factors evaluated in the textbooks?There are mainly two parts of the study, content analysis of textbooks and questionnaire of textbookusage.In the content analysis component, twelve textbooks of three versions were analyzed. The texts andsome other sections in three samples were abstracted. They were identified as perspectives, practices,products, persons and cross-cultural comparison. The cultural contents were then classified as Englishspeaking countries, native country and non-English speaking countries.The second part is questionnaires, content in first two books of each sample were included in threeversions of questionnaires. The basic structure is same in each questionnaire. The questionnaire mainlyconsists of six columns: book, unit, topic, scale of preference, reasons for preference and reasons forobjection. The last part is an open-ended question. The questionnaire was mailed to three schools usedcorresponding textbooks.The four cultural factors and their originated areas are not distributed in a balanced way. Culturalcontent about perspectives and cross-cultural comparison was relatively scarce, while nearly half of them isabout products. Under the guidance of the new curriculum standards, each sample is providing chances forcross-cultural opportunity. The breadth of cultures represented in these textbooks can be improved either.The amount of coverage on the cultures of English speaking countries is much greater than that of othercultures. Cultural content included in textbooks should not pay much attention to the target culture.Increasing the amount of material on foreign cultures other than target culture in textbooks is necessary.Culture is an essential component in English language teaching. The present research finds that culturalcontents in textbooks can be arranged in a more suitable and appropriate way. It provides empirical evidenceon cultural content in future English textbooks compilation.