Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Background of the study
Language and culture have an indivisible relationship. It is emphasized by manyforeign language educators and linguists that acquiring a new language means much morethan the manipulation of syntax and lexicon. According to Malinowski (1935), “Anunderstanding of a language is impossible without constantly relating it to the culture inwhich it is operative.” The importance of culture is also clarified by Brown (1994),“Culture and language are so intricately interwoven that one cannot separate the twowithout losing the significance of either language or culture.” Byram (1994) has alsoargued that, “Only when the cultural context is understood can the language rooted in thecontext be thoroughly comprehensible”.Besides that, it is well known now, it is not enough for only mastering the languageitself, but also using it for communication. Because of modernization and globalizationworldwide, understanding of different cultures is becoming more and more important forpeople with different values and beliefs. Compared with the old days, there are morechances for modern people to contact people from other cultures. So in modern world, itdemands a higher level of intercultural communication. Therefore, traditional emphasis ononly linguistic issues in English as foreign language class has now been expanded todevelop students’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC).
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1.2 Purpose and significance of the study
As mentioned above, culture is so important in communication and should be paidattention to in language teaching and learning. So, we should attach importance to culturein English teaching practice. In the meantime, the textbook plays a crucial role in collegeEnglish Education, because it is the leading resource of culture in class, therefore it’s veryimportant and necessary to evaluate whether the textbooks used in college English class fitthe users’ culture expectation and meet their needs. In this research, the author choosesExperiencing English Integrated Coursebook (EEIC) (second edition) as the text foranalysis. EEIC is published by Higher Education Press and is one of the widely-acceptedEFL materials in China, it is specially developed for the non-English majors in collegesand universities. As a Nationally Planned Textbook for “Tenth Five-year Plan”, the firstedition appeared in 2017 for the first time, and its second edition was published in May,2017. But in today’s English teaching practice, new situations and problems emerged oneafter another. Therefore, this study intends to analyze the textbook in cultural perspective,that is, to investigate the distribution of culture themes and the evaluation of teachers andstudents to identify the strengths and weaknesses of EEIC in terms of culture. The authorhopes the result will contribute to English textbook compiling and English teaching andlearning in the future.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Definitions of the terms in the study
There are so many different definitions of culture by linguists. They defined culture indifferent aspects. In the past, culture tended to mean that body of social, artistic, andintellectual traditions associated historically with a particular social, ethnic or nationalgroup. Now this term is used much more broadly. According to Kramsch, “One way ofthinking about culture，英语毕业论文，英语论文范文
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