A Study On Advance With English From The Perspective Of Intercultural Communication

With the understanding and integration of various cultures, Intercultural communication has become the main characteristic of the international exchanges in the 21 century. The interaction among people from different cultural backgrouncds is quite a complicated process.In 2003, the Ministry of Education issued Curriculum Standards for Senior English(CSSE), which set cultural awareness as one of the five objectives in senior English teaching for the first time. The English Language Curriculum Standards for High Schools(draft) issued in 2004 has given greater priority to the cultivation of cultural awareness than ever before and considered cultural awareness as an important aspect of the comprehensive capability of language using. As a vital part of language teaching and learning, textbooks deserve greater concern in terms of culture teaching.Textbook is the main resource for foreign language teaching, a lot of scholars at home and abroad have carried out studies on English teaching materials in recent years. The existing statistics suggests that numerous researches have been focused on textbook comparison, textbook evaluation, teaching design and the use of textbooks, only a few researches concerning the cultural contents based on textbooks. Taking a look back on English teaching in our country, the author finds that most studies in this field in our country concentrate on the English teaching process, and mostly choose college students as research subjects. The researches done on EFL textbooks in senior high are quite limited.In order to fill in this gap, this thesis investigates and studies the intercultural elements and contents involved in Advance with English (Modulel to 5) published by Yilin Press, which aims to find out the intercultural characteristics of the Advance with English textbooks and provide useful suggestions for textbook users and compilers. In the process of the research, the thesis mainly solves the follwing problems:(1)What kinds of interculture-related contents required by the Standards are included in Advance wilh English (Modulel to 5) ?(2) How to improve students' intercultural communication competence based on the Advance with English textbooks?The study mainly adopts quantitative research. Questionnaire is the main means of the research. The questionnaires are handed out to 100 senior students in a senior high school in Nanjing and 98 questionnaires are found valid. Finally, the data is calculated and analyzed by SPSS 17.0.The findings of the research show that: (1) The Advance with English textbooks meet the requirements of the development of intercultural knowledge of the senior high school students by the Standards. The Advance with English textbooks cover various intercultural contents. (2) Students prefer those contents which have close relationship with their daily life. The contents concerning cultural psychology are not easy for students to understand and accept.The findings of the present study are valuable for both the cultivation of senior high school students' intercultural communication competence and the design of senior high school English textbooks. Meanwhile, it is also meaningful for senior high school English teaching.