A Study Of The English Cultural Background On Junior High School Students' Students' English Reading

With the development of the globalization and the increasing international communication, English as an international language plays a more important role in the development of the society. Therefore, it's so an urgent task to strengthen and reform the English teaching in the junior and senior school education. English teachers keep trying all kinds of new teaching methods in the teaching practice. Some experiments and researches are constantly being performedIn the process of foreign language teaching in the junior high school, especially in the teaching of reading, the teachers may find that although there are few new words and the students can easily understand the grammar structure, it's also difficult for them to understand the deep meaning of the reading materials. The reason of this kind of understanding error or comprehension barrier is mainly caused by the lack of English cultural background knowledge.Reading is the process in which a person synthetically uses the language, cultural background, and other professional knowledge. Culture is a complicated social phenomenon. There are cultural differences between different societies and language is part of the culture, a certain reflection of it and also a media. Any language will contain its cultural content, so cultural background knowledge is the important factor which influences the understanding of foreign language reading.In order to fulfill the research, such instruments --- two quizzes, and two questionnaires are designed. The content of the quiz and questionnaire are related to the cultural background knowledge on geography, way of life, history, custom, art, religion, social tradition, etiquette, etc. The results of this study show that the students know too little about the related cultural background knowledge in English speaking countries.The writer keeps conducting some surveys on the infiltration of cultural background knowledge in English reading which achieve good results. The students can be well integrated into the cultural content in the teaching material under the guidance of the teachers. The students have a more comprehensive understanding of the western history, geography, customs, religion, literature, social system and values and other cultural phenomena. The teachers can make the English teaching more situational and contextual as long as we make full use of all sorts of rich cultural information and gain cultural background knowledge by varying the effective ways. Also, it can improve the students'identification and appreciation of foreign culture to further improve the English reading ability.