| Foreign language learning is comprised of several components, including grammaticalcompetence, communicative competence, language proficiency, as well as a change inattitudes towards one's own or another culture. People in different countries have differenthistorical heritages, social customs, religious beliefs and so on. When people of differentlanguages and cultures communicate, misunderstandings may arise although the languageused in communication may be faultless. In order to communicate with the foreign people, weshould study not only their languages, but their cultures.Language is a part of culture and plays a very important role in it. On the other hand,language is influenced and shaped by culture;it reflects culture. There are significantdifferences between Chinese culture which is based on the Eastern culture and English andAmerican culture which is based on the Western culture. These differences will deeplyinfluence the Chinese secondary school students during their process of studying English. Asa result, to combine culture teaching and English teaching efficiently will greatly improve thestudents' ability of using English.Unfortunately, English teaching in China has not paid enough attention to cultural factors.Instead, focus has mainly been placed on the structure of the language. Language learning inthe classroom continues to be conceived as a training rather than as "real" communication oras an introduction to a foreign society. As a result, after several years of English study, thestudents with a good command of vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar still findthemselves at a loss when they communicate directly with the native English speakers, andmisunderstanding between people from different cultures will happen.The necessity of culture teaching has been realized by some English educators andEnglish teachers. But what to teach and how to teach remain the main questions that languageeducators and language teachers are concerned with. Therefore, the thesis is to discuss thecontent and methods of culture teaching in secondary schools based on an analysis of thecurrent situation about secondary school students' language and cultural knowledge in anattempt to develop a reasonable culture teaching model so that the students' interculturalcommunicative competence will develop. |
