A Research Into The Cultural Awareness Development In High School Reading Learning

With the economic and social development, the deep reform and opening to the outside world, and the development of Internet, the whole world is transforming into a"global village". The communication between China and the outside world is increasingly frequent, therefore people have more opportunities to contact foreign cultures. The combination of English teaching and intercultural communicative competence is playing an important role in English language education, which is widely acknowledged by English teaching circle. Besides, it is stressed in the new teaching syllabus. Cultivating students'cultural awareness has become one of the main objectives of TEFL these years. Though English teachers have come to realize that culture is an important aspect of language, they are hesitant about their views on how to teach the English culture. How to teach culture in foreign language education in the Chinese cultural environment is a hot topic. This thesis attempted to make some researches in this field about cultural teaching based on high school English teaching, especially exploring the approach of reading.The thesis contains five chapters in all. First, it provided a brief analysis of the problem existing in present English classes, hence confirming the necessities of cultural awareness development. In the second chapter, came the theoretical consideration. It gives a brief account of the definitions of language, culture, reading methods, cultural teaching principles and their relationships, which lays the theoretical basis for the thesis. The third chapter stated the practical methods and approaches to cultural teaching in English classes.The fourth chapter is the key chapter of the thesis. Throughout nearly one year, it conducted a research of current cultural teaching into high school students with reading methods. Two classes, each consisting of 65 students, were chosen respectively as the control group and the experimental group for their same level of English proficiency. Culture-emphasized instruction was adopted in the experimental group, while in the control class traditional teaching method was used as usual. It designed a questionnaire and a test for students and a questionnaire for teachers. At the same time, recorded the results of each language test held in the school. By questionnaires and teaching practice, get the true data of the research. Then, after analyzing the data, the thesis offered the practical suggestions.The fifth chapter showed the positive result of the research, proving that it is effective to cultivate students'cultural awareness in English teaching with reading methods. It is not only helpful to solve the existing problems in English teaching in China's high schools, but also contribute valuable reference to TEFL in high schools in China.