A Survey On Current Situation Of Culture Teaching In Rural Senior High School

English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School (2003) lays out the requirements on cultivating senior high school students’intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence. The Curriculum (2003) points out that senior high school English culture teaching involves at least two aspects in foreign language teaching:one is imparting target language cultural knowledge to students; the other is fostering students’cultural awareness. While in China, empirical researches on culture teaching are comparatively fewer in the field of English language education, most of which are concerned with learners. Whereas, there are few empirical studies on senior high school English teachers’practice of culture teaching, rural senior high school teachers are even rarer.The thesis tries to investigate the current situation of the practice of culture teaching in rural areas. Data is collected from35senior high English teachers and109Grade Eleven and Twelve students in Yongfu County, Guangxi Province by means of questionnaire, interview and classroom observation. The main questions of this research are:1. What are the rural senior high school teachers’understanding and attitudes towards culture teaching?2After the new curriculum standard was issued, whether culture teaching is being underway and gets the due concern in rural senior high school?3What factors influence and restrain teachers’performing culture teaching in rural senior high schools at present?Based on the data collected from the survey, we find that the majority of teachers and students are interested in cultural knowledge. They have paid close attention to culture teaching and culture learning. However, there still exist many problems, mainly including the following aspects:First, although the syllabus has set requirements for cultivating students’intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence, teachers’implementation of culture teaching is far from the goals. Most teachers paid much more attention to language teaching but neglected or avoided culture teaching. That is because senior high school English teaching is dominated by the examinations, while the current examinations included few contents related to cultural knowledge. Heavy language teaching tasks mean that teachers have no desire to carry on culture teaching. Second, most of teachers have low intercultural communicative competence, and they were weak in both intercultural knowledge and abilities, and they are not competent for culture teaching. Finally, a lack of appropriate culture teaching materials and textbooks is another reason.According to the above results, in order to implement culture teaching effectively in rural senior high schools, we can first offer teachers in-service culture training to enhance the rural senior high teachers’intercultural communicative competence. Second, adding the information related to target culture to English examinations as well as adapting the textbooks which contain more cultural knowledge are also of great help to implement culture teaching. Finally, making full use of culture teaching to arouse students’learning interest will be of great benefit to developing students’intercultural communicative competence.