CONTENTS AND INSTRUCTION OF CULTURE IN NEW ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS FOR SENIOR HIGH SCHOOLS IN TAIWAN

• Main Authors: Chien-hung Cho, 卓建宏
• Other Authors: Ai-ling Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2002
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/78119595462537425572

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 西洋語文研究所 === 90 === In response to Taiwan’s development towards globalization and needs for multiple knowledge bases, Ministry of Education not only allowed senior high schools to adopt and develop their own teaching materials, but released the right for private publishers to publish communicative-approach-based textbooks. The communicative approach aims to develop the four competences of learners: grammatical competence, discourse competence, sociocultural competence, and strategic competence. From the sociocultural perspective, the researcher investigates senior high school students’ and teachers’ perception of the culture or cross-cultural awareness in the English instruction. Moreover, both senior high school students’ and teachers’ attitudes and levels of satisfaction towards curriculum arrangement of these new English textbooks (including the teacher’s manual) that facilitate learners’ sociocultural competence is also the focus of this research.. This research also looks into teachers’ preferences and needs in their instruction of culture. The materials used in this research are the Far-east textbooks and the Nan-yi textbooks. The subjects of this search include both teachers and students from two senior high schools respectively who make use one of the of textbooks, the Far-East version or Nan-yi version, for English language learning and instruction. As far as the method is concerned, the researcher conducts content analyses based on the related literature and questionnaires for all the subjects. The results of the study reveal that both students and teachers have recognized the significance of culture or cross-cultural awareness in the language instruction. When it comes to the contents of the reading texts, the outcomes show that both sets of textbooks have put more emphasis on selection of reading texts concerning about local or other cultures. However, most subjects feel that reading texts are mainly literature-oriented so that the new English textbooks should contain various topics. In this study, most subjects show their preferences for topics related to recreation, traveling, music, customs and cultures. Nevertheless, most subjects to some extent disagree that the new English textbooks have achieved the goal of providing balanced descriptions of both sexes and minority groups. As for the teacher’s manual, teachers generally feel the teacher’s manual has achieved the goal of providing sufficient cultural background information. Finally, most teachers prefer watching films as the main activity of transmitting cultural information, and video tapes and CD-ROMs are the most available resources for instructing cultural concepts in the language classroom.