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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Culture Teaching in Language Teaching
Intercultural foreign language teaching integrates language teaching with cultureteaching, which is mutually penetrated with each other in the interacting process. Italso helps learners’ language proficiency and intercultural communicative competenceat the same time. Hence, the major concern of intercultural foreign language teachingis to find out an optimal way to integrate language teaching with culture education onthe grounded of an understanding of the intertwined relationship between languageand culture. Culture teaching is now becoming an increasingly essential component oflanguage pedagogy and in most countries, intercultural communicative competencehas become one of the most significant aims of foreign language education.To start with, it is a necessity for us to clarify the concept of intercultural foreignlanguage teaching to fully comprehend the vital significance of cultivatingintercultural communicative competence stipulated in the new curriculum criteria.Although currently the term “intercultural foreign language teaching” is not useduniversally, whether it is the “teaching a foreign language for culture-basedcommunicative competence” used by Seelye (1994), or the “language-cultureteaching” advocated by Byram(1994), they all have many things in common in termsof foreign language teaching strategies. Broadly speaking, the optimal and final goalof intercultural foreign language teaching is: on the one hand, to enhance learners’communicative competence with foreign languages; on the other hand, to fosterlearners’ intercultural communicative competence. In this sense, the cultivation oflearners’ intercultural communicative competence is located in three aspects: namely,knowledge, ability and attitude (Zhang 2007: 197).
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2.2 Textbooks in Language Teaching
Textbooks used in foreign language instruction are primarily designed tofacilitate language learning, but they cannot simply do that since language learning isinseparable from its cultural context and they are the kernels of materials referring toall available to teachers and learners in and out of classroom. The following part willbe a brief introduction to definition, roles of textbooks and theories on textbookscompilation. In a narrow sense, teaching material refers to textbooks, or termed as coursebooks, utilized by both teachers and students in and out of classroom. Broadlyspeaking, it covers a wide range of material, including textbook, exercises, Referencebooks, video tapes, discs and teaching objects and etc (Liu, 2004). Textbooks play anindispensable part to both teachers and students in and out of classroom and are oftenconsidered as the center in the process of teaching and learning.EFL textbooks can be analyzed as having important functions on several levelsas stated by Hinkel (2001: 199-200). A textbook can be a teacher, in the sense that itcontains the material that is intended to instruct students directly aboutEnglish-speaking cultures. A textbook is also a map that gives an overview of astructured program of linguistic and cultural elements, showing the teachers andlearners the ground to be covered and summarizing the route taken in previous lessons.Many textbook show the cultural topics in the outlines of their contents.
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