An Evaluation Of Cultural Content In Senior English Textbook From The Perspective Of Intercultural Communication Competence

In 2017,the General High School English Curriculum Standards(revised)incorporated cultural awareness into the newly proposed framework of core literacy in the English subject,stipulating that the overall objective is to cultivate socialist builders and successors with Chinese sentiment,international perspective,and intercultural communication competence.Textbooks are an important source of knowledge for students and an essential vehicle of achieving teaching objectives.The evaluation for a textbook can be used to assess its characteristics and content,to investigate whether the specific content in it meets the needs of students,and to enable teachers to understand its nature and structure for the better teaching application.Therefore,from the perspective of intercultural communicative competence,this study evaluates the PEP version of New Senior English for China(NSEFC)(from Book 1 to Book 7),which has just completed three years of systematic use.This study focuses on answering the following three questions:(1)What cultural content has been selected from the new PEP version of New Senior English for China(NSEFC)based on Byram’s Criteria for Textbook with Focus on Cultural Content?(2)Taking the five elements of Byram’s Intercultural Communication Competence Model as the theoretical framework,to what extent do the textbooks reflect the goal of developing intercultural communication competence?(3)After using the textbooks,how do students and teachers using the textbooks evaluate the intercultural communication competence of the new PEP version of NSEFC?This study addresses the above questions primarily through internal and external evaluations.The internal evaluation includes a text analysis which is used to summarize the distribution of cultural content in the textbooks and a corpus analysis which aims to retrieve and analyze the texts and exercises through a self-constructed textbook corpus.The external evaluation is conducted through a satisfaction questionnaire sent to senior high students and through semi-structured interviews with three English teachers to present their views on the development of intercultural communicative competence in the textbooks.The study’s findings demonstrate,firstly,that the cultural content of the textbooks is broadly chosen,with all eight criteria items covered but with a stronger emphasis on society,critical thinking,and behavior aspects.Secondly,the corpus search results reveal that the four elements of Byram’s Intercultural Communication Competence Model occupy about 5,000 hits of the textbook corpus,suggesting that the development of students’ intercultural communication competence is a vital content choice for textbooks.The four components are,though,not equally distributed,particularly the component of critical cultural awareness,which takes up more than half of the textbooks.Thirdly,students’ evaluation of the textbooks in terms of developing intercultural communication competence is generally positive.Nevertheless,students feel that the element of skills is not adequately presented in the textbooks.In addition,all the teachers who participated in the interviews agree that the textbooks have improved students’ critical thinking skills and are more culturally and economically relevant.However,other areas for improvement are also noted,including the absence of comprehensive intercultural material and more useful communication abilities.Based on the study’s findings,recommendations that systematize the presentation of cultural content and increase communication skills are made for the development of textbooks.Suggestions that progressive and diversified approaches to intercultural teaching and learning are made for teaching applications.