A Study Of The Cultural Content And Its Application In Go For It From The Perspective Of Intercultural Competence

The development of intercultural competence is one of the important goals of foreign language teaching in primary and secondary schools.Foreign language textbooks are a key means of achieving this goal.English textbooks are the primary medium for teaching and learning cultural content,and evaluating English textbooks is of great relevance.This study evaluates the reading texts and exercises in Go for it from the perspective of intercultural competence,sorts out the strengths and weaknesses in developing students’ intercultural competence,and proposes targeted improvements based on students’ perceptions and teacher’ feedback,with the aim of providing references for the development of foreign language textbooks.Based on the intercultural competence model,this study takes the exercises in Go for it as a sample,and uses Ant Conc4.0.9 to build a small corpus(19906 words).Through the text analysis of reading texts and exercises,combined with questionnaires,interviews and classroom observation,it is planned to solve the following three research questions: 1)What are the strengths and weaknesses of reading texts and exercises in Go for it in developing intercultural competence? 2)How do students perceive Go for it in developing intercultural competence? 3)How do teachers use the Go for it to develop students’ intercultural competence?The main findings are as follows: First,in terms of cognitive understanding,Go for it helps expand students’ knowledge base about world cultures,but the number of texts about Chinese and universal cultures is low and the types of topics are not rich enough,mostly related to family and school cultures.In terms of behavioral skills,the Go for it exercises help develop students’ skills to communicate,listen,reflect and evaluate,relate and compare,and manage conflict.The weaknesses are the lack of development of observing and discovering,learning and creating,and describing and interpreting.In terms of emotional attitudes,the Go for it exercises are designed to foster students’ critical and objective attitudes,but it lacks the development of respect and tolerance,understanding and appreciating,and curiosity and openness.Second,students believed that the materials are rich in intercultural knowledge,which is conducive to the development of intercultural attitudes,but weak in effectiveness for the development of skills.Third,teachers tended to develop supplementary exercises to develop students’ skills to observe and discover,relate and compare,communicate,reflect and evaluate,and be critical and objective.Instead,the original topics of the textbook were used to promote students’ listening skills,conflict management skills,and learning and creating skills.In addition,the teacher’s classroom exercises are largely devoid of content that involves describing and interpreting,respect and tolerance,understanding and appreciating,and curiosity and openness.Based on the findings of the study,this study presents the strengths and weaknesses of Go for it and suggests the following improvements for improving the compilation of foreign language teaching materials and teachers’ teaching in the future.Firstly,the reading texts of Go for it should be appropriately increased in Chinese and universal culture.Secondly,exercises of Go for it should pay more attention to the developing the following behavioral skills as appropriate: observing and discovering,learning and creating,and describing and interpreting.Thirdly,the textbook should be supplemented with exercises that address the development of students’ emotional attitudes.Fourthly,teachers should make conscious efforts to fill in the gaps in the materials.