Abstract:
China is committed to strengthening the capabilities of international communication, particularly for cultural exchange and intercultural understanding. Against this policy background, provision of English education is becoming increasingly important. Textbooks are the main learning resources and vehicles for conveying cultural content and for developing students’ language competence for international communication. Given the significant role of textbooks in China, we built a corpus and investigated how cultures were represented in the available College English textbooks which were included in the “Twelfth Five-Year Plan”, a national development strategy launched by the Chinese Government. Results show that in terms of the breadth of foreign cultures represented in these textbooks, there was an obvious imbalance. Most of textbooks overwhelmingly featured American and British cultures, and marginalized the cultures of the rest of the world, including Chinese cultures. These findings are discussed in relation to their possibly negative influence on Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of language skills and on their diverse cultural repertoires. Implications are offered for EFL teachers and students, particularly textbook writers, to take these findings into consideration when revising the existing textbooks so as to better serve the current national cultural strategy.
