Cultural Content Problems In Junior High School English Textbooks By PEP And Countermeasures From Intercultural Communication Perspective

Textbooks serve as both the carrier of teaching content and an important medium for connecting teachers and students,hence the importance of textbooks in foreign language teaching is indisputable.English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022)by the Ministry of Education proposes cultural awareness as one of the core competencies,and lists specific goals for each stage of learning,with intercultural awareness and communication emphasized as key points.It can be seen that English courses attach great importance to cultivating students’ intercultural communication competence.Therefore,after the analysis of junior high school English textbooks by PEP,the author finds that there are many problems in the compilation of cultural content of the textbooks,mainly including:(1)The culture of only English-speaking countries is covered,with the UK and the US accounting for over 85% of the target language(English);(2)Chinese cultural content is slightly-mentioned,simple and repetitive.The contrast between Chinese and Western cultures cannot be found quite often in English textbooks;(3)The cultural coverage in the textbooks is narrow and superficial,neither diversified nor up-to-date;(4)The distribution of cultural content in the textbooks is scattered and blindly piled up.This study focuses on the typical problems of the cultural content of the textbooks and puts forward specific countermeasures,hoping to make the cultural content meet the requirements of the new curriculum standard,so as to promote students’ intercultural communicative competence.After analyzing the defects of the cultural content in the junior high school English textbooks by PEP from an intercultural perspective,this thesis finds that although the proportions of source culture,target culture,and international culture are balanced,the source culture(Chinese culture)is simple and repetitive,and the target culture mainly focuses on British and American cultures.Additionally,the cultural types are single and lack diversity and contemporaneity,failing to fully meet the cultural content requirements proposed in English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022).Furthermore,the distribution of cultural content is scattered and lacks a systematic and progressive presentation.It is found that the cultural content presented in the junior high school English textbooks by PEP is poorly designed and quite necessary to have further improvement.To deal with the problems found,this thesis puts forward such countermeasures to improve the cultural content of textbooks:(1)Adding more cultures of other countries with English as their mother tongues,such as Canada,and Australia;(2)Selecting typical Chinese culture and deleting repetitive and simple cultures;emphasizing the contrast between Chinese and Western cultures.(3)Replacing outdated cultural content with new,deeper,and practical cultures.(4)Gradually increasing the difficulty and quantity of cultural content;establishing a specialized and systematic cultural corpus and material library;adding a “cultural handbook”.These countermeasures can help to solve the problems in the defects of cultural content,making the textbooks better meet the requirements of cultural content in the new curriculum standard,so as to effectively cultivate students’ intercultural communication competence.