The New and Old Curriculum Standards are mainly compared and analyzed in the following aspects including connotation, status, significance, specific performance, and development goal of cultural awareness, cultural knowledge, and cultural awareness goal as Table 5 has shown.
Conclusion
To better understand and use the latest PEP senior high school English textbooks from the perspective of cultivating cultural awareness, a comparative study is made to the old (published in 2007) and new (published in 2019) textbooks of the PEP edition based on the New English Curriculum Standards for Ordinary Senior High Schools (2017 edition, 2020 revision) and Cheng Xiaotang’s Textbook evaluation theory.
Based on what has presented in previous chapters, findings can be made as follows:
Firstly, the New Curriculum Standards put forward higher requirements for the cultivation of cultural awareness which, however, are more operable and of great guidance for teachers to implement.
On the one hand, the New Curriculum Standards provide a richer and more detailed connotation of the concept. It not only refers to the cultural knowledge, cultural understanding, intercultural communication awareness and ability but also includes the formation and development of essential character. It digs deeply into the historical background and social roots behind cultural phenomena and requires students to be able to understand the historical significance and practical value of cultural phenomena on the basis of the acquisition of cultural knowledge and observation of cultural phenomena. On the other hand, the New Curriculum Standards raise the status and significance of cultural awareness which is now one of the final goals to cultivate instead of a pre-stage to achieve the goal of language learning. And the New Curriculum Standards expand the development goal of cultural awareness and the scope of cultural knowledge, focusing more on how to make students understood and recognized as who we are and how unique and excellent the students are instead of those of the English-speaking countries.
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