An Empirical Study On The Application Of MIT-based Model In Senior High Cultural Corner Teaching

Issued by the Ministry of Education in2003, the New English CurriculumStandards for senior high school have absorbed the latest researches in culture andforeign language teaching both at home and abroad, elevated the cultivation ofcultural awareness to a theoretical height and further confirmed that enhancingstudents’ cultural awareness belongs to one of the five basic goals of Englishteaching. Besides, the current New Standard English textbooks also havecorrespondence with the New Curriculum requirements in contents, having designeda new section—Cultural Corner to introduce cultural knowledge. However, theteaching reality of this section is far from satisfaction as the teaching still depends oninstruction on grammatical points and reading strategies which lead to boredom inclassroom, depression of students and lowness of learning effect. What is worse,neither can the current teaching interpret the goals of the New Curriculum culturalawareness nor can it promote the all-round development of students. In view of thecurrent situation, this study attempts to establish a new model for Cultural Cornerteaching to permit senior high English teaching to make a balance between beingconsistent with the curriculum standards and utilizing Cultural Corner as teachingresources well. In so doing, not only students’ cultural awareness in foreign languagelearning but also students’ all-round development can get effectively promoted.On the basis of making theoretical discussion on Gardner’s Multiple IntelligenceTheory and analyzing the current teaching of Cultural Corner in senior high school,this study tends to put forward an idea of teaching Cultural Corner via MIT inconsideration of the characteristics and requirements of the English CurriculumStandards. This study believes that only through MIT can the diversity andpracticality of Cultural Corner teaching be highlighted and students’ various learningpotential mechanisms be activated. In sum, this study proves both theoretically andpractically that MIT is an ideal tool for providing students with multi-channel for English culture and language learning.This study employs a hybrid research methodology. An empirical study iscarried out in Mian Yang middle school for sixteen weeks, involving eightygrade-one students, with half of them constituting the experimental group and therest forming the control group. Both two groups have participated in two tests,namely the pre-test and the post-test. The results of the tests are then analyzed bySPSS software and three conclusions have been drawn:1) MIT has shown notable improvement on students’ memory of culturalknowledge and better students’ understanding of cultural phenomena;2) By boosting students’ confidence and interest to learn, MIT has played asignificant role in motivating students to learn cultural knowledge so as to facilitateEnglish learning;3) The obvious difference between the newly-proposed MIT-Based CulturalCorner teaching and the traditional Cultural Corner teaching lies in that theMIT-Based model is more efficient in getting students fully involved in CulturalCorner teaching compared with the traditional model.At the end of this thesis, the author concluded the implications for CulturalCorner teaching, pointed out the research’s limitation and listed several suggestionsfor the further study.