A Study On The Integration Of English Culture Into Middle School English

In order to meet the ever-increasing demand for cross-cultural communication,the Chinese Ministry of Education approved a new curriculum for the English courses in senior middle schools, which lays emphasis on the cultivation of students' culturalawareness, cultural sensitivity and cross-cultural communicative competence. It is obvious that the goal of foreign-language teaching can be achieved only when the teaching of culture, namely the cultivation of learners' communicative competence, is incorporated into the curriculum. For a long time, however, the emphasis of English teaching in China has been put on the teaching of grammar and words, while the introduction of the intercultural differences has been largely neglected, which has caused students' lack of intercultural awareness. Consequently, despite the fact that most students have grasped some rules of English grammar and a tolerable number of words, they are still unable to communicate properly in the language.Therefore, this paper examines how cultural input should be conducted in senior high English teaching. By means of questionnaires and interviews, I give brief descriptions of the status quo of language teaching and learning in senior high schools in China and try to identify some problems, and then propose some possible solutions. I focus on how cultural teaching and learning is carried out in senior high schools with relevant goals, principles, contents, and strategies as its research objects. It is hoped that it can shed some light on intercultural awareness cultivation in senior high English education.This paper is made up of an introduction and four chapters. The introduction gives a rationale of this study and a general description of it. Chapter One is a review of some major theories on cultural teaching. In Chapter Two, three surveys are given to reveal the status quo of the English language teaching and learning in China. With the results of statistic analysis and subjects' answers to questionnaires as its foundation, it reveals the necessity and urgency of carrying out cultural teaching in senior high schools in the city of Haikou in Hainan Province. Chapter Three is a description of a teaching experiment conducted in a key senior high school, including its designs, goals, principles, materials, as well as methods of research. Chapter Four summarizes my findings and points out its shortcomings as well as some suggestions for future research.