语言学论文哪里有？笔者认为在中国传统的应试教育模式下，中国的英语教材编写者更注重词汇和语法，而不是文化知识。然而，根据新的《高等教育英语教学大纲》，教学原则之一是培养学生的跨文化交际能力。因此，文化学习在英语教学中非常重要，值得关注。
1 Introduction
1.4 Layout of the Thesis
The thesis includes 6 chapters.
Chapter One is a brief introduction to the whole thesis. This part mainly introduces the research background, showing that cultivating international talents is the important task of the teaching of English majors. It also emphasizes the importance of the intercultural foreign language teaching. In addition, due to the limitation of teaching forms and resources, students still mainly acquire cultural knowledge from the textbook. Therefore, the cultural phenomenon in English textbook is an important learning source for college students in China.
Chapter Two is about literature review. This part introduces some related theories of culture, cultural teaching and textbook evaluation briefly. It also presents some previous studies of culture teaching and textbook evaluation at home and abroad. According to above theories, theoretical framework of the study is proposed. This study adopts Cheng’s systematic textbook evaluation theory and Byram’s criteria for cultural content in the textbook to conduct research on An Integrated English Course (second edition).
Chapter Three is concerned with research methodology. The methodology engaged in this study is introduced, which contains the research questions, subjects, instruments, data collection and analysis.
Chapter Four is the internal evaluation of the cultural elements in An Integrated English Course (second edition). The author analyzes the cultural themes under Byram’s classification of cultural content in the textbook. The author selects the representative articles in the textbooks and analyzes them in detail. Moreover, the distribution, layout, characteristics of cultural content in the textbook are discussed.
3 Methodology
3.1 Research Procedure
The research is divided into two parts: the first part is the evaluation of the textbook An Integrated English Course (Second Edition), and the second part is about the survey of the opinions of textbook users(students and teachers).
In the first part, the textbook An Integrated English Course (Second Edition) is chosen as the subject, which is widely used by English majors in college and published by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. The compiler-in-chief is Professor He Zhaoxiong. The textbook is composed of texts and exercises. After surveying the textbook for many times seriously, the author finds most of exercises are purely for the information acquisition or language practice thus they are excluded. There are 14 units in one textbook and each unit has two texts: main text and sub-text. Generally, the sub-text is a supplement of the same topic for the main text. There are a total of 112 texts in four textbooks and these texts are research subjects in the study. The author analyzes the cultural content of the textbook by Byram’s criteria. According to his eight criteria, the author collects and lists all the cultural phenomenon from the texts in An Integrated English Course (Second Edition), and classifies and categorizes them one by one. There are 56 units in four textbooks and each unit has two texts: unitⅠand unit Ⅱ.
5 External Evaluation of the Textbook
5.1 Results of the Questionaire
5.1.1 Current Situation of Culture Learning
(1) Students
The investigation of current situation of culture learning aims to survey English majors’ cultural level. As is the data shown in Table 5.1, it can be seen that the mean value of “I think I lack the understanding of cultural knowledge” is 3.49 (SD=0.86). Concerning the specific percentage, 43.7% (29.1%+14.6%) students believe they don’t master enough cultural knowledge, while only 9.1% students disagree. The data prove that English-major students desire to acquire more cultural knowledge and more efforts should be made in culture teaching. And as for item “I believe my intercultural communicative competence still needs to be enhanced”, the mean value of it is 3.85 (SD=0.87), which even exceeds the former one. Among the participants, there are 58.2% (29.1%+29.1%) students hope to improve their intercultural communicative competence, 40% students hold general attitudes, while only 1.8% students indicate that they are satisfied with their intercultural communicative competence. Combing the results of two items, it can be concluded that most of English-major college students don’t master the cultural background knowledge very well and they desire to enhance their intercultural communicative competence.
5.2 Discussion
Through above analytical results, it can be found that there are similarities and differences between the feedback of the teachers and that of the students. From the perspective of current situation of culture teaching, both students and teachers are unsatisfied with the current level of culture learning and they agree that the intercultural communication competence needs to be enhanced. From the perspective of feedback on culture teaching, both of them comparatively emphasized the importance of cultural knowledge. Teachers show a higher cultural awareness than the students. In addition, teachers’ standard deviation in this dimension is larger than students, which demonstrates teachers have different opinions on the item “current culture teaching can meet cultural needs of students” and “Chinese culture is also important to students”. From the perspective of understanding of cultural knowledge, students admit they show a preference in British and American culture and neglect the learning of native culture while teachers believe students have a better understanding of Chinese culture rather than Western culture, which reveals that there may be a cultural loss in Chinese culture. From the perspective of opinions on textbooks, both teachers and students support that cultural elements should be involved in the textbooks. But it seems that more teachers encourage students to search cultural knowledge in other ways rather than textbooks. From the perspective of the overall impression of An Integrated English Course (Second Edition), most of the textbook users hold a general attitude, which proves that the textbook can meet English majors’ cultural needs to some extent but there is still room for improvement. In terms of the feedback on 8 cultural themes, many teachers and students point out the imbalance of the 8 cultural themes in the textbook. It is noticed that the cultural elements related to “social interaction” are less involved in the textbook, thus some changes should be made in the textbook compilation.
6 Conclusion
6.1 Major Findings
On the basis of Cheng’s systematic evaluation, this thesis first conducts an internal evaluation to analyze the distribution of cultural elements involved in the textbook under Byram’s classification of cultural content, then collects feedback on An Integrated English Course (Second Edition) from teachers and students and then makes some suggestions on textbook compilation and future culture teaching. Conclusions of the research are presented from these perspectives.
1) As for the first two research questions, according to Byram’s criteria of cultural elements in the textbook, it can be found that An Integrated English Course (Second Edition) covers all the 8 cultural themes, but with uneven percentage. To be more specific, cultural themes “socialization and life-cycle” and “belief and behavior” occupy a larger percentage among the themes while “social interaction”, “national geography” and “social and political institution” are less involved in the textbook. Besides, the cultural content related to comparative culture and Chinese culture is relatively infrequent in the textbook. There are 6 texts about Chinese culture and only 4 texts compare the similarities and differences between different cultures. According to previous researches, many scholars critically reflect on the ideology and cultural orientation implied by the textbooks, and point out that textbooks are unbalanced and distorted in the selection and presentation of social and cultural knowledge from the perspectives of globalization and localization, cultural identity, cultural homogenization and hybridization, cultural deterritorialization[52]. Therefore, much efforts should be made in the distribution and arrangement of textbook compilation in order to further promote the construction and research of college English textbooks in China.
2) From the results of the questionnaire, it is delightful that the majority of teachers and students have relatively high cultural awareness. However, they hold different opinions on the effects of culture teaching. Students believe they acquire British and American culture more than Chinese culture, and they have difficulties in expressing Chinese in English with accuracy and fluency. But it seems that teachers ignore the importance of Chinese culture in English language teaching. Besides, their opinions on textbooks show a difference. As for English-major students, textbooks are still their main source for culture learning and they hope more cultural knowledge should be increased in the textbook.
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