Research On Popular Culture In English Textbooks From The Perspective Of Children’s Experience

As a product of the modern science and technology revolution,popular culture has rapidly occupied the center of the entire cultural production and consumption with majestic momentum since its birth,changing people’s way of life,work and means of communication,especially has had an unprecedented impact on the spiritual world of teenagers.In recent years,there has been a lot of popular culture contents in textbooks.Whether popular culture should be included in the curriculum has become a hot issue.At present,there are few studies on popular culture in the field of English education in China,and lack of popular culture research from the perspective of children’s experience.This study aims to explore the composition and use of popular culture in English textbooks from the perspective of children’s experience,so as to provide reference for the compilation and use of popular cultural content in English textbooks.This study mainly uses the text analysis method and the interview method.In this study,the Oxford Shanghai version of the junior middle school English textbooks were choosed as the text analysis objects,7 teachers and 35 students from F school and Y school were selected as the interviewees.The study first analyzes the proportion of popular culture in the English textbooks,the classification of the topics and the way of presentation,and analyzes whether the composition of popular culture is reasonable.And then interprets the contents of popular culture from the perspective of children’s experience.This study constructs the following analytical framework on the basis of the studies of students’ experience,takes children’s experience as diachronic life experience,examines the children’s existing popular culture knowledge,the current experience of popular culture and the future imagination of popular cultural life.Finally,this study analyzes how teachers use popular cultural content to reflect children’s experience in the three stages of teaching preparation,implementation and evaluation.Through the composition of popular culture and the interpretation of popular culture in English textbooks,it is found that the content of popular culture is increasingly rich but the module is unevenly distributed,the content of popular culture is simple and the westernization tendency is obvious,the proportion of popular culture is imbalance and does not match the students’ needs,the content ofpopular culture is not consistent with students,experience because of lag.In addition,it is found in the survey of the use of popular culture content:teachers and students generally recognized the value of popular culture,not yet aware of its hidden impact;teachers understand students’ preferences,but can not effectively use students’experience;teachers’ curriculum development awareness is highlighted,but teachers’curriculum development ability needs to be improved.Based on the above conclusions,this study will put forward two recommendations on the compilation and the use of textbooks.The first recommendation is about improving the compilation of English textbooks:pay attention to the rationality of popular culture content arrangement;introduce local popular culture content appropriately;select the popular culture contents that meet the students’ needs and interests;highlight the era of popular cultural content in textbooks and make it conform to the students’ experience.The second recommendation is related to the improvement of using English textbooks:focus on popular culture,guide students to understand popular culture in a rational way;pay attention to the students’ experience and take students’ experience as the curriculum resources;enhance teachers’ re-development ability of English curriculum and encourage students to participate in curriculum development.