A Research Of The Infiltration Cultural Background Knowledge Into English Reading Teaching In Junior Middle School

The New English Curriculum Standards (2011) still emphasizes the importance of English reading and infiltrating the necessary culture in teaching. As the deepening reform of the new curriculum, and based on the development of the new teaching theories and methods of teaching reading as well as the English teachers’ teaching experience, people have realized that linguistic deficiency has been one of the factors contributing to students’ poor reading comprehension day by day.One of the most special features of the newly released textbooks which are used in Tianjin published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press emphasize acculturation during our teaching steps, and it has been a good way to help students develop their cultural awareness. In English reading teaching in Chinese middle schools, we should not separate teaching from the target language countries’ cultural background knowledge; on the other hand, we should give more concentrations on the integration between English and its culture. And also, we realize that it is necessary to infiltrate English culture into students’ mind during the basic teaching step. Students’ familiarity with English culture will help them understand the materials they are reading, motivating them to use cultural schema to communicate with the author. This thesis is based on the theories of language and culture and schema. It emphasizes the important role played by infiltrating cultural background knowledge into English reading. This study puts forward the hypothesis which reading combined with cultural education based on cultural-linguistics theory, will develop students’ comprehension ability. Thus, it shows that we should give students more information about English cultural background knowledge, containing customs, ways of thinking, values, beliefs, etc. through reading training. This will give help on improving students’ reading comprehension ability as well as making the students interested in English learning. The experiment was conducted as an attempt to justify that the introduction of English culture to teaching the English reading can develop students’ knowledge of English cultures. And how to make the students active is the most important. The author carried out a survey of90junior middle school students and also made an interview with some teachers to see their major problems in cultural learning and English reading.This thesis consists of five parts:Part one is the introduction, stating the importance of infiltrating cultural background knowledge into English reading teaching and the problems of ineffective cultural teaching.Part two mainly states the definition of culture and language and the relationship between them. It also introduces the definition of reading comprehension and the theory of schema and the relationships among them.Part three mainly concentrates on the research methodology. The selection of reading materials for training and the procedures of the experiment are described.Part four focus on the result of the experiment and discussion based on the data analysis with the aid of the scientific software SPSS18.0on data processing.Part five is the conclusion of the thesis and some advice to teachers are offered on improving students’ reading ability and some implications about further research in this area.