A Comparative Study Of Education For International Understanding In Junior High School English Textbooks In China And Japan

In the era of "global village",promoting international understanding becomes the important educational objectives and content in different countries.English teaching,as an important channel,plays a vital role in it.Japan,our close neighbor,has accumulated abundant experience in its English curriculum reform based on education for international understanding.Meanwhile,textbooks are one of the important components in English curriculum and carrier of education for international understanding.Therefore,this article makes a comparative study of education for international understanding between Japan and China,which aims to learn from each other and further improve the implementation of education for international understanding in our English teaching.This study selects two typical English textbooks in Japan and China,namely New Crown and Go for it,and then makes a comparative study of the content related with international understanding.The main research methods include literature research,textual analysis and interviews.Based on the analytical framework the author constructs,relevant content is sorted out from the perspective of subject matter,cognitive requirement and attitude tendency.Then the writer tries to analyze their similarities and differences.Through analysis and comparison,it can be concluded that subject content,cognitive requirement and attitude tendency of the relevant resource in two English textbooks have many common features as well as some dificiencies.In terms of subject content,five commonness and characteristics are listed as follows:1.The sub-topics have a wide but uneven distribution,which complies with students’ age feature and interest;2.The subject content in two textbooks involves much domestic culture as well as British and American culture,which embodies the integration of native and target language culture;3.Two textbooks choose cultural content in difFerent perspectives.4.In content arrangement,Japanese textbook is more systematic,while Chinese textbook is relatively dispersed;5.In content presentation,Japanese textbook mainly adopts dialogues,while Chinese textbook mainly uses third-person narration.As for cognitive requirement,two points are summarized:1.Two series put forward different cognitive requirement based on different subject content or sub-topics;2.The distribution of cognitive hierarchy in grade is more reasonable in Japanese textbook,which conforms to students’ cognitive patterns.In terms of attitude tendency,there are also two points about the similarities and differences:1.The content related to education for international understanding in two textbooks both imply positive attitudes;2.The embodiment of the positive attitudes is diversified,which means two textbooks select different kinds of positive words to show the positive attitudes.In the end,based on the conclusion,this article makes some suggestions for textbook compilation and classroom teaching.