A Review On The Cultural Structure Of Junior English In China

Culture and language are closely interrelated. As an important part of culture, language has helped the shaping and development of culture and is regarded as the premise upon which the growth of culture is based. Culture in turn has furthered the advance of language which is both the carrier and the mirror of culture.Due to the close relationship between culture and language, the acquisition of a foreign language by children is not simply the acquisition of that language, but also the acquisition of all the aspects of the culture of which that language is a part. From this point of view, foreign language teaching is a kind of foreign culture teaching which must be ensured throughout the whole process of classroom activities. Only by combining language teaching with culture teaching in all the teaching procedures, can our teaching work achieve better results and our students acquire satisfactory communicative competence.As culture teaching is so important, this paper has chosen it as the topic in the study of English teaching in junior middle schools in Wuhan with its focus on the cultural structure in the English Textbooks for junior middle schools in China. In addition, this choice is related to the factor that the significance of culture teaching in junior middle schools has not been given enough attention to over the past years.To make a good study of the topic, this paper is centered around the nation-wide adopted English textbook used in 2000 (Junior English For China [2000 edition]) as it occupies a very important position in foreign language teaching and performs the function of the medium of conveying the cultural knowledge. It is static as well as dynamic because it is constantly used by teachers and students and chosen as the research target, it can directly clarify the current situation of culture teaching in foreign language teaching. The whole paper will focus on its cultural structure, comparing it with JEFC (1993 edition) according to the Fifth Degree of cultural demands in the Curriculum Standard for English issued by the Department of Education in the year 2000, examining its strengths and weaknesses and puttingforward proposals for perfecting the culture teaching in today's English teaching in our junior middle schools.This thesis consists of five sections. The first section is a brief introduction. The second chapter addresses such issues as the concepts of culture and cultural structure, and reviews the changes in the cultural structure of the junior English textbooks used over the past twenty years. The third chapter first classifies the Fifth Degree of cultural demands in the Curriculum Standard for English Teaching as knowledge culture and communication culture, then examines the cultural structure of JEFC(2000) from both the static and the dynamic angle according to such a classification. The next chapter, Chapter 4, makes suggestions for improving our culture teaching to meet the demands set in the Curriculum Standard. And the last chapter summarizes the whole paper.