A Study On The Development Of The Cultural Awareness Of Senior Middle School Students

Language is the carrier of culture .The process of learning a foreign language should be the process of learning the cultural contents of this language at the same time .Applied language teachers have become increasingly aware that a second or foreign language can rarely be learned or taught without addressing the culture of the community in which it is used. The thesis analyses the shortage of students' cultural awareness in their English learning. It sets out to raise students' cultural awareness, helps students and teachers realize the necessity of it. To achieve this, several approaches are employed in the research work.During the English teaching, because of the influence of the traditional teaching methodology, much attention has been paid to the form of the foreign language while less attention on its cultural context, which are the main cause of the students' pragmatic mistakes. The students often produce grammatically correct but inappropriately used sentences. Therefore, the thesis suggests that it should necessary to raise students' cultural awareness. The theoretical basis of the thesis is the relationship between language and culture .The thesis illustrates as follows: language reflects culture, culture limits language; they are based on each other, and are linked closely; communication is closely related to culture. Also, to achieve the goal, the thesis combines the actual teaching with comparison, illustration and observation. For this, the author has done some experiments for two years. And part of the thesis is the report of the experiments, which may be useful for other language teachers.