Culture Instruction In Senior English In The New Curriculum Standard Context

With the implementation of the New Curriculum Standard in Senior English, the notions of cultural awareness and culture instruction are being accepted and carried out in EFL classrooms by English teachers. It is commonly believed that language and culture are inseparable and that culture instruction must be integrated with language teaching. To successfully realize the general objective of English teaching, English teachers should try every means to integrate culture instruction with language teaching. This paper is to find out the status quo of culture instruction in Senior English within the new Curriculum Standard context and make some suggestions for improving the situation. Through two questionnaires for teachers and students respectively, we find out that the implementation of the new Curriculum Standard does benefit culture instruction in Senior English, and most English teachers have realized the importance of culture instruction, however, due to historical and practical reasons, there still exist two big obstacles to culture instruction: lack of qualified English teachers and no efficient assessment system.The new Curriculum Standard gives us explicit definitions of culture and culture awareness and further points out that culture awareness is one of the five components of comprehensive language competence. It also clearly prescribed cultural goals for each grade, which is instructive to English teachers in their course of culture instruction. The above are the favorable factors for culture instruction in Senior English. However, we also find that the in-service English teachers themselves have low communicative competence and low cultural awareness as a result of the formerly unscientific education. Thus they are unable to effectively carry out culture instruction in EFL classrooms. We hold that the key to promoting culture instruction in Senior English lies in teacher development. In teacher development, the education authority should give financial support to schools and teachers, providing opportunities of training for English teachers while the English teachers themselves should shift teaching conception, paying more attention to self improvement and form the notion of lifelong development, consciously strive to master and apply modern teaching methodologies. English teachers should also fully realize the importance of culture instruction, set up cultural goals at the very beginning and integrate culture instruction with language teaching in every class. As to the solution to the obstacle of assessment system, the "direction indicator" of NMET papers should play their due instructiverole and include more questions about culture. In the EFL classroom, English teachers should create favorable conditions for students to appreciate the diversity of Chinese culture and English culture and develop students' cultural awareness by providing students with diverse cultural materials so as to foster their patriotism, help them better understand the native culture, and ultimately turn them into qualified socialist constructors of the 21st century.