Culture Teaching And Learning In High School Reading Course

The world seems to be getting smaller with the convenience brought about by modern transportation and communication, which has reduced the time and distance that once kept the people of the world apart. In this "global village", the contact between people of different cultures becomes more and more frequent. How to make teaching of English meet the needs of social and economic development has become an urgent task to English teachers. Especially developing learners' intercultural communicative competence is drawing more attention in English teaching. For the first time it has been prescribed into the new English Curriculum Standard, which is being carried out all over the country. Obviously this is a challenge to most senior English teachers.Intercultural communication was introduced into China by Hu Wenzhong and other scholars in the 1980s. Ever since then many Chinese scholars and foreign language teachers have been working in this field and have tried to apply the findings in their research to English teaching. RC (Reading Course) has been considered as the essential component of EFL (English as Foreign Language) teaching and learning. Unfortunately, in China, reading has long been viewed as a passive process. Most teaching methods adopted in RC are to read the text quickly, retell the text, answer questions, and do multiple choices and so on. The result of such teaching methods is that students lose their interest in RC and neglect the culture learning.Language is a set of symbols and the rules for combining those symbols are used and understood by people in a community. When we study another language, we soon discover that the symbols, the sounds for those symbols, and the rules for using those symbols and sounds are different. Language does not exist apart from culture.Culture is a key concept in English teaching. Definitions of culture are numerous. E. B. Talor first defined culture as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society" . Since then, many other scholars have offered...