Research on the Presentation and Optimization Strategies of Chinese Cultural Elements in College English Textbooks

Abstract

Against the backdrop of national cultural development and curriculum-based ideological and political education, college English textbooks bear dual missions of language instruction and international communication of Chinese culture. This paper takes full sets of freshman and sophomore general college English textbooks from mainstream domestic publishers as qualitative research samples. Guided by Culturally Responsive Teaching theory and Byram’ s nine-theme textbook evaluation framework, this study adopts documentary research and qualitative text categorization to analyze three tiers of Chinese cultural materials. The text sorting reveals three core defects: Western cultural contents dominate textbooks, three categories of Chinese culture are unevenly distributed, and listening-reading input tasks are disconnected from oral-writing output exercises. Rooted in textbook compilation concepts, single assessment standards and insufficient teachers’ cultural literacy, this paper constructs a three-dimensional improvement system. Balancing cultural proportions, enriching multi-level cultural themes and designing targeted output tasks can maximize textbooks’ cultural education value. Distinct from previous macroscopic discussions lacking textual verification, this study provides operable suggestions for textbook revision and school-based teaching material development.