The Influence Of Cultural Factors On English Teaching Reading In Senior Middle School

Reading is the most important purpose and means of language teaching. Reading comprehension is receiving more and more attention in high school English teaching. How to improve students'ability is one of the issues that most teachers have been discussing recently. Some of them have developed effective teaching methods. However, we can find that many teachers still pay much attention to vocabulary and grammar while neglect the connection between language and culture. In current Senior English Textbooks there are a lot of texts about cultural background knowledge. The purpose is to have students learn the cultural knowledge, such as history, geography, customs and so on. After reading, students can understand the texts more clearly and deeply. In this paper, the author aims to investigate the role cultural factors play in reading comprehension so that students can use their prior cultural knowledge to develop their ability. The paper is divided into six chapters. Chapter one is an introduction, stating the importance of culture teaching in foreign language education. Chapter two mainly concentrates on the definition of language and culture and the relations between them. Chapter three illustrates what reading is and the reading comprehension process. Chapter four focus on the course of present study. The author introduces the subjects, the procedures, the materials and the results of the study. Chapter five is about the requirements for the teachers and how to teach cultural knowledge to students. Chapter six concludes the research and give some advice to the teachers on how to improve students'reading ability further as well as some advice on the research in this field.