A Comparative Study On Cultural Knowledge Arrangement In Senior High School English Textbooks

Cultural awareness,as one of the four core competencies of English Subject Core Competencies in General Senior High School Curriculum Standards: English(2017 Edition,2020 Revised Edition),counts considerably in cultivating students’ cultural awareness,and also implementing the fundamental task of fostering virtue through education.Textbooks are the main medium for transmitting culture.This study is based on text analysis to help teachers better use textbooks for cultural teaching in the classroom,and corresponding suggestions are proposed.This thesis tries to solve the following three questions:1.Which countries’ cultural knowledge is included in the senior high school textbooks of PEP Edition,FLTRP Edition and BNUP Edition published in 2019 from the perspective of culture knowledge of various countries,especially China and English-speaking countries?2.What cultural knowledge is included in the three editions of textbooks from the classification between material culture and spiritual culture as described in General Senior High School Curriculum Standards: English(2017 Edition,2020 Revised Edition)?3.How do teachers who use three editions of textbooks implement cultural teaching based on understanding the cultural distribution and classification in the textbooks?This thesis uses mixed research methods to make a statistical analysis of the compulsory1-3 volumes of the three editions of textbooks,and using the interview method.It is found that: 1.The cultural regions of three editions of textbooks are widely distributed,but imbalanced between mother tongue culture,target language culture,other countries’ culture,and world culture;2.Cultural classification covers both material and spiritual cultures,but each subcategory does not cover a comprehensive range,with a lower proportion of material cultures compared to spiritual cultures;3.Teachers give high evaluations of the textbooks,mentioning the imbalance in cultural regional sources and a lack of material culture.Therefore,teachers will supplement students with other countries’ cultures and material cultures.