Teaching Culture In Middle School English Teaching

It is generally acknowledged that culture plays a very important role in English teaching. Many scholars have given different definitions to culture and explored its contents from different ways. Hymes (1972:281) thinks that among the four parameters of possessing communicative competence, the essence of the fitness and appropriateness is the language users'socio-cultural ability. Many scholars, both at home and abroad, have done a lot of research on cultural teaching. But so far systematic research has not been done enough on present middle school English cultural teaching. This thesis probes into cultural teaching in middle schools, which takes the new Junior and Senior English for China as its source materials, the new English Course Standards as its foundation and middle school students as its specific objects.This thesis consists of four parts:In Chapter One, the author give a literature review briefly which offers the current situation on teaching culture both at abroad and at home, especially the recent research in China.In Chapter Two, discusses the denotation and connotation of culture. The culture in this thesis refers to the history and geography, local conditions and customs, patterns of living and thinking, values and beliefs of the main English-speaking countries. We discuss language and culture that are inseparable. Communication is the center of culture that is the goal of language learning. Culture differences are part of the important influential factors of communication. Culture plays a very important role in English Language Teaching (ELT). At the same time, this chapter describes the necessity of cultural teaching. Teaching culture is one of the five goals of the new English Course Standards and the contents of culture are very rich in English textbooks for middle school students, thus cultural teaching should be carried out in middle schools together with language teaching. And modern society has a great desire to teaching culture to middle school students. In Chapter three, in order to make clear the actual effect, the author conducted a test in Shouguang No.1 Middle School and Tancheng No. 1 Middle School in Shandong. (See Appendix A)The result tells us that it is necessary to incorporate cultural knowledge into English teaching in middle schools. Cultural teaching can not only arouse middle school students'interest in learning English, but also increase their cultural awareness and inter-cultural communicative ability.In Chapter Four, we analyze contents of teaching culture in middle school English textbooks including the verbal and nonverbal differences, linguistic differences, figures and famous places.We propose some approaches in cultural teaching, such as the audio-visual approach, the comparative approach and the task-oriented approach to make middle school students understand English culture and develop their inter-cultural awareness and the ability of inter-cultural communication.We put forward the principles of cultural teaching to be obeyed in middle schools, such as principle of correlation, principle of appropriateness and principle of progressiveness.