Cultural Content in the 2019 People's Education Press Senior High School English Textbooks: an Analysis of the Reading Texts

Textbooks are the main channel through which senior high students in China meet the cultures ofthe English-speaking world, and since 2019 they have also become a channel for telling China’s own story inEnglish. This paper reports a content analysis of the 35 main reading texts in the seven volumes of the 2019People’s Education Press senior high school English textbook series. Each text was classified according to itsdominant cultural anchor: Chinese culture, English-speaking culture, other cultures, universal topics, or a mixtureof cultures. Universal topics formed the largest category, with 11 texts (31 percent). English-speaking cultureaccounted for 9 texts (26 percent), Chinese culture for 8 texts (23 percent), other cultures for 5 texts (14 percent),and mixed texts for 2 (6 percent). The series gives considerable space to Chinese cultural content, a deliberateresponse to the 2017 curriculum standard, while keeping British and American settings well represented. Regionsoutside China and the English-speaking world appear only occasionally. The paper discusses what this distributionmeans for cultural awareness and intercultural competence, and it offers practical suggestions for teachers whouse the series.