Mother and I

Abstract

Teaching materials are a manifestation of culture. "Teaching material culture is social culture manifested in the contents of teaching materials and in teaching activities. It represents a society's authoritative systems of knowledge, values, and concepts, and explicitly exhibits the given teaching contents selected by the society's leading class(es) for the socialization of children and young people. It is a tool for disseminating value concepts and ideology."1 English language teaching materials are even more distinctive. In English teaching materials and teaching, one must give expression to the Chinese society's requirements and expectations with regard to the socialization of children on the one hand and, on the other, because the English language is the creation of a foreign culture, English language teaching materials and teaching manifest the Chinese people's reading and reconstruction of that foreign culture. Junior middle school English-language teaching materials are targeted at twelve- to fifteen-year-old children in their adolescence. In terms of English-language studies, they cannot reach the level of children of the same age in countries where English is the mother tongue, and so the contents of English teaching materials seem relatively simple in comparison with the intellectual and mental level of students of this period. However, it is precisely in the simplicity and directness of this language that the cultural characteristics of English-language teaching materials surface more distinctly.