Oxford High School English Textbook Cultural Orientation Study

In fact, learning a foreign language is also a study of its culture. Language is the carrier of culture, and culture makes the language more expressive. Correspondingly,language teaching is also a kind of cultural instruction for target language countries.English teaching and culture teaching are complementary to each other, only when we involve culture teaching with foreign language teaching can we truly achieve our teaching objectives and improve students' ability for cross-cultural communication.With the new curriculum reform in China,China's new curriculum standards are farther more clear and standardized. The new curriculum also embodies the close relationship between cultural teaching and language teaching, and emphasizes that cultivating students' intercultural communicative competence is an important target content of foreign language teaching. At the same time, it puts forward the cultural consciousness grading goal of senior high school education.Textbook is an important carrier of foreign language teaching and an important tool for cultural heritage. As the main resource and tool for students' learning, the cultural content of it has a significant effect on culture teaching. With the promulgating of the new National English Curriculum Standards, many kinds of high school English teaching materials appeared one by one. They all contain some cultural content but have a little difference in selection and configuration. In 2005,students in Jiangsu province began to use Advance with English (Yilin-Oxford Edition)as their textbooks. As an English teacher of a high middle school in Jiangsu, the author selects this version of high school English teaching material as research objective, whose aim is to check whether this set of teaching material meets the requirements of new curriculum in cultural aspect, and in hope that the text compilers can further make the teaching material improved. In the meanwhile, we teachers can make better use of this teaching material and make culture teaching more effectively.Based on the research above, the author draws some conclusions as follows: firstly,the cultural contents contained in Advance with English, as a whole, can be classified into target language culture, native language culture and universal language culture,while comparative language culture is less involved. Secondly, cultural topics selected for Advance with English are closely linked to students' daily life, thus arousing students'interest in learning English. Thirdly, as for communicative culture, focus is given to that embodied in verbal communications, and those hidden in nonverbal ones as well as ideologies are seldom mentioned. According to the study results, the author gives detailed suggestions to the selection and setting of cultural elements in the textbook.In addition, it gives a further analysis to the principles of cultural content setting in EFL textbooks and proposes some supplementary ways to facilitate culture teaching so as to enhance students' cultural consciousness.