A Study On The Introduction Of Cultural Knowledge In A Secondary Vocational School

Cultural knowledge in English teaching arose in the eighties of the twentiethcentury. It has been closely linked with China's reform and opening to the outsideworld. Cultural background knowledge is arranged in various kinds of Englishtextbooks. Teachers should make every effort to teach cultural knowledge duringlanguage teaching in order to make students gain the cultural atmosphere of theEnglish-speaking countries unconsciously. However, at present in English teaching inChina, most of teachers pay more attention to the knowledge of the language whileneglect the culture of the target language countries. This thesis mainly discussesproblems about introducing cultural knowledge to affect the students' motivation andcultural awareness in the second vocational and professional school. The author ofthe thesis makes a questionnaire of cultural knowledge to the students to know thatthe students in the vocational school are poor in the cultural knowledge.The author combines the teaching of cultural knowledge with Jere Brophy'sstrategy of motivating students to learn to arouse the students' interest in Englishlearning and to develop their cultural awareness. The experiment has been madeamong 80 first-year students from two paralleled classes in a vocational school. Oneclass is the experimental class, and the other is the controlled class. Tests are given tothe students at the beginning of the experiment. All of the students use the sameteaching materials. But the teacher in the experimental class uses multimediacomputer, pictures, watching movies and videos to introduce the cultural background knowledge about the text to stimulate the students' motivation and cultivate theircommunicative competence. After the two-term training, the experimental classoutperforms the controlled class in the interest in learning English and achievementin the tests. It is clear that it can stimulate the learners' motivation and develop thestudents' intercultural communicative competence by using the method ofintroducing cultural knowledge to the students in the vocational school.