The Development And Revision Of The Chinese Cultural Syllabus For China’s High School English Teaching

In recent years,English has gradually become a lingua franca in the international community and is used as a tool for people from different countries to communicate with each other.Thus,English is not only combined with English cultures anymore but becomes a medium for enhancing the mutual understanding and learning between different countries.As China occupies a more and more important place in the international community,spreading Chinese culture to the world has been urgent and crucial.Against this backdrop,cultural awareness,which means the understanding of Chinese and foreign cultures and the recognition of fine culture,is mentioned in the new English Curriculum Standards as one of the English core competences.Therefore,English courses are no longer confined to helping students to know target-language cultures,but should also integrate the teaching of Chinese culture so as to develop students’ intercultural communication competence and prepare them for the future intercultural communication of Chinese culture.However,there is not yet a Chinese cultural syllabus for China’s high school English teaching.Thus,developing a precise and comprehensive Chinese cultural syllabus is more than necessary.This study adopts literature research,text analysis,questionnaire survey,and interview as research methods.After retrieving and referring to studies related to cultural classification and cultural syllabus,the author develops an initial Chinese cultural syllabus.Then,by analyzing the content of native culture in the high school English textbooks of China,Japan,and Korea as well as in National Matriculation English Test（NMET）,the author worked out the first revised version of the syllabus.Finally,after interviews and questionnaire survey regarding the importance and language competence requirements of the Chinese cultural items in the syllabus,the syllabus is revised for the second time and the final version is thus finished.The research result of this study is mainly about the Chinese cultural syllabus which consists of three levels,with 6 cultural items in the first level,40 items in the second level,and 80 items in the third level.Each cultural item is presented with the examples collected from the textbooks,the degree of importance,and the language competence requirements generated from the questionnaire data.Based on the research results,the study draws the following conclusions: the Chinese cultural syllabus contains various types of Chinese cultural items which are of a certain degree of importance;a correlation is found between the degree of importance and the language competence requirements of cultural items;though there are similarities and differences between the data collected from text analysis and questionnaire,they both have reference value.Based on the results mentioned above,the study puts forwards some suggestions for cultural syllabus developers,editors and writers of high school English textbooks,and high school English teachers.