An Investigation Of Culture Teaching In English Class In Senior High Schools In The City Of Wuhai

Culture and communication are inseparable and interactional. With the globalization of the world economy, the importance of culture has been realized by more and more people. New Curriculum Standards for senior high school requests that:In order to achieve the goal of English teaching efficiently, the combination of the cultural instruction and language teaching should be conducted during the language acquisition. In this way, the cultural awareness and the communicative competence of the students are to be developed.However, for a long time, in our English class, linguistics knowledge and competence have always been overemphasized while English culture neglected. Hence culture teaching and learning should be set as an important subject in foreign language education.The thesis makes a tentative study of cultural teaching in English class by performing a questionnaire in different types of senior schools in the city of Wuhai, aiming at exploring such questions:Whether is cultural teaching in senior high school English class being underway? How is it getting on? What problems exist in culture teaching at present? How will it be carried out in future? In the investigation, the author chose three senior high schools which are typical in the city of Wuhai, two schools are key schools, and the other is a regular one. The number of the students who participated in the investigation is150; the number of the teachers who participated in the investigation is100.The results showed that culture knowledge is deeply loved by students as well as teachers. The worries lie in several aspects:teachers are poor at their culture quality; there are no available and systematic culture teaching and learning materials; the present teaching hours and NMET system restrict the culture learning; teachers’cultural consciousness affect students negatively; the motivation and limited time and energy of the students also result in poor culture learning.Based on the study and analysis of the current cultural English teaching, the thesis respectively gives some possible suggestions to the related teachers, educational training bodies, senior school authorities, textbook composers for further research. In the end, the thesis comes to the culture introduction to the English class and argues for the contents and four different methods of the culture introduction, including cultural narration; cultural infiltration; error analysis; extra-curricular reading method. The author thought that culture teaching should become an integrated part in English class and it is the key element to form the intercultural competence.