A Study On The Cultural Contents Of Advance With English

The Ministry of Education issued Curriculum Standards for Senior English (CSSE) in2003, which set cultural awareness as one of the five objectives in senior English teaching for the first time. Since textbook is the main source for foreign language teaching, it is necessary to give enough consideration to inter-cultural communication (ICC) in textbook compiling. The existing literature shows that numerous researches have been focused on the comparison of textbooks, textbook evaluation, teaching design and use of textbooks, but few researches have been found on the cultural contents based on Advance with English.In order to fill in this gap, this study is undertaken to investigate the cultural contents involved in Advance with English which was published by Yilin Press and Group of Phoenix Medium, with a particular purpose to find out the characteristics of cultural contents in Advance with English and provide more suggestions for textbook users and compilers. And for this purpose, this paper seeks to answer three questions:1) What kinds of culture-related content are included in Advance with English?2) What is the students’attitude towards the cultural contents of Advance with English in terms of learning?3) What is the teachers’attitude towards the cultural contents of Advance with English in terms of teaching?The theoretical framework adopted in this thesis is based on Mc Donough and Shaw’s textbook evaluation theory, Zhang Hongyan and Zhang Gecheng’s classification of culture and Hu Wenzhong and Gao Yihong’s checklist of cultural items are adopted to identify and classify the cultural contents of in the textbook (49passages). Both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in the study. The quantitative research mainly involves a questionnaire which is self-designed on the basis of Grant’s textbook evaluation theory. The questionnaires are handed out to83senior one students and15English teachers in Jintan senior high school and finally98valid questionnaires are found valid. Then, the data is processed by SPSS17.0. For the qualitative part, interviews are made to collect more information. Six students and six teachers are invited for the interview by convenience.Analysis of quantitative and qualitative research yields the following findings:Firstly, among the49passages involved in the Advance with English,12passages are concerned with target language culture, six are about native culture, seven are for world culture and24passages are for other cultural components, which touches a great majority of cultural items and can stimulate students’ interests. But some problems still exist:1) Knowledge concerned with culture contrast is neglected which is conducive to cultivate students’ ICC;2) Advance with English is more about English-speaking countries’ knowledge while the knowledge of world culture is few;3) Cultural behavior items are the basic input while the cultural psychological items are the key points and purpose.Secondly, generally speaking, students prefer those contents which have close relationship with daily life. Psychological items are not easy for students to understand and accept. They also hoped that knowledge concerned with native culture and culture contrast should be added.Thirdly, teachers point out that the effect of the cultural contents in examinations is not positive. They believe that the cultural contents involved in the textbook are too complex and difficult to teach in a systematic way.The major findings generated from this study may have some pedagogical implications:From the perspective of the textbook compilers, users’ needs should be taken into consideration that knowledge about culture contrast should be added and those difficult cultural psychological items should be reduced. From the perspective of the education administrators, they should not only provide teachers with training opportunities for teaching skills but also should add more guidance of culture knowledge to improve their teaching ability and theoretical level. From the perspective of evaluating system, culture-related contents should also be included in test with aim to draw both student’ and teachers’ attention.