文化符号承载着一个民族的文化，是文化对外传播的重要内容。随着社会进步和文化的发展，文化符号在今天发挥着自己独特的作用。本文将王一川（2010）列举的“最具有推广价值”和“最具有传播价值”的两类文化符号中重复的部分作为本文检索的关键词，共33个文化符号；以我国权威党政时政数据管理平台“人民数据”数据库所收《人民日报》1997年至2017年间共计80万条、2亿字新闻语料为研究内容，选取其中反映中华文化符号的报道，作为研究对象。采用ROSTCM内容分析工具，及其内置的Netdraw插件对所得语料中与文化符号常用来搭配的词语进行提取，分析其中含有文化符号的报道中的语义网络，以及不同文化符号出现文本中的高频词，联系社会背景，分析在二十年社会发展的同时，各文化符号出现的频次和搭配用词的变化，对对外汉语报刊教学提出建议。

通过对二十年间含有文化符号的新闻报道进行整理，可以清晰地看到，中国社会在过去的二十年间，民主政治建设的进程得到了发展，社会主义市场经济制度的建立完善给人们的生活带来了极大的改变，既提升了人们的生活质量，扩宽了人们的视野，改善了人民的精神面貌，又使得人们开始在全球化的时代意识到传统文化的独特价值，让传统文化在当代社会发挥出独特的作用。二十年间，各文化符号出现频次上升，在出现各文化符号的新闻报道中，出现较多的是“发展”“建设”“问题”“全面”等词所构成的搭配；出现频次较高的词有“改革”“发展”“问题”“建设”等。说明《人民日报》的新闻报道在重点呈现政治类内容的同时，对文化类内容的关注在逐渐上升，但目前还集中在对于文化符号的经济价值、开发潜力的展现上。在对文化符号选择的倾向上，以政治和经济类文化符号出现次数为多，“茶”“丝绸”“汉语”“中医”等文化符号出现频次逐渐上升，说明在二十年间，随着我国经济实力的提高，文化软实力和对外传播能力也随之增强。

本文通过分析含有文化符号的新闻报道，发现传统文化符号在当代社会的生产、消费中均发挥着独特的作用，是历史社会的一面镜子，是承接传统与现代的重要联结，在对外汉语教学中，对文化符号和与之有关的关键词进行教学，既可以帮助学习者了解中国文化，又有助于学习者感受当代中国社会的发展。在语言教学中引入和文化符号有关的词，可以帮助学习者更好地掌握汉语文化知识，更可以帮助学习者了解汉语的搭配特征，帮助学习者学习汉语。对和文化符号有关的语义网络和高频词进行分析，得出的关键词有助于帮助对外汉语教材编写者编写对外汉语报刊课教材，用于语言技能测试等。

Cultural symbols carry the culture of a nation. They play an essential role in the field of cultural communication. As Chinese society has changed over the past 20 years, its culture also changed a lot. Cultural symbols are playing a unique role in this process. This article takes the repetitive parts of the two types of cultural symbols listed by Wang Yichuan (2010), which are "the most popularizing cultural symbols" and "the most worth campaigning cultural symbols", as the keywords of this article. There are 33 cultural symbols in total. The research materials are the newspaper, The "People's Daily" news text, collected by the management platform "People's Data" database. The time span lasts from 1997 to 2017, with 200 million characters, and 800,000 news corpus in total. The main method is, selecting the report text that contains the Chinese cultural symbols. Using the ROSTCM content analysis tool and its built-in Netdraw program to extract the co-appear words commonly used with cultural symbols in the resulting news texts, analyze the semantic network in the selected reports. Count the high-frequency words in the text, and relate the word frequency with the social background to analyze the over-time change in the collocation words during the two decades of social development.

By sorting out news reports containing cultural symbols in the past two decades, how Chinese society changed over time can be observed. In the past two decades, the ongoing process of democratic political construction in Chinese society has made evident progress. The establishment and development of the socialist market economy institution have radically improved people’s lives. What's more, great changes brought people a better quality of life, a broadened horizon, and improved education level. Chinese people begin to realize the unique value of traditional culture in the era of globalization, which helped traditional culture become a unique part of contemporary society.   Over the past two decades, the word frequency of the corresponding cultural symbols has obviously increased. In news reports that containing the cultural symbols, a group of words has the most frequency in forming a collocation, they are "development", "construction", "problem" and "comprehensive". The words that include "reform", "development", "problem" and "construction". It shows that while the news reports of "People's Daily" emphasize political topics, their attention to cultural content is gradually increasing, but it is still focused on the display of the economic value and development potential of cultural symbols. In terms of the tendency to choose cultural symbols, political and economic cultural symbols appear more frequently, and the frequency of cultural symbols such as "tea", "silk", "Chinese", and "Chinese medicine" has gradually increased. With the increase of economic strength, the soft power of culture and the ability of external communication also increase.

Through analyzing news reports containing cultural symbols, this research finds that traditional cultural symbols play a unique role in the cultural production and consumption of contemporary society. They are a mirror of the historical society. They connected tradition and modern society and culture. In the field of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, incorporating cultural symbols can not only help learners understand Chinese culture, but also can demonstrate a picture of the development of contemporary Chinese society.The incorporation of newspaper and the cultural symbol, is applicable in the field of Chinese language learning, as well as language ability evaluation.