A Study On Teaching Strategies In Senior High English Reading Instruction

Language and culture are inseparable. The study on how to integrate cultural awareness teaching into the old traditional English reading class has been one of the hottest focuses in English reading teaching.From a cultural awareness cultivation perspective, the study for three months was carried out in one key middle school in Beijing. During this study, as the New Curriculum Standards for Senior High English Students (NCS)(2003) listed, observation to the teachers and the students, interview and questionnaire to the teachers were all used in this study. According to the findings, the thesis discussed the teaching aims and teaching strategies in different teaching stages from an interactive reading approach and the pre-reading&while-reading&post-reading teaching model view.This thesis has five chapters in all. Chapter1generally describes the present research focus points and limits on cultural teaching in English reading class, and then proposed the objectives of this study. Chapter2makes a proof to the reasonability of the pre-reading&while-reading&post-reading teaching model in the present reading class from a cultural awareness cultivation perspective by making an analysis of literature review on the relationship between language and culture, the cultural teaching aims and contents in China and abroad, and the reading theories and the reading teaching theories. Chapter3gives a detailed description of the research objectives, the involved participants and data collection methods. Chapter4respectively discussed the teaching aims and teaching strategies in the pre-reading and while-reading and post-reading teaching stages.Chapter5makes conclusions of the teaching aims and teaching strategies in each stage. In the pre-reading stage, the teaching aim is to activate students’cultural background knowledge.And the useful teaching strategies are kinds of ways to set the scene by providing some similar and familiar things or some relevant information clues according to the reader’s background experience. In the while-reading stage, the basic cultural awareness teaching aim is the comprehension. Besides that, getting the cultural knowledge from the reading materials, and having a positive cultural understanding are also the aims in this stage. The useful teaching strategies are providing relevant cultural knowledge notes to help the students to settle the key words and phrases, giving scaffolding questions for the cultural knowledge by asking literal comprehension questions, giving scaffolding questions for the cultural understanding by asking inferences and evaluation questions and personal response. In the post-reading stage, the basic teaching aims focus on their comprehensible output. These outputs could focus on the cultural knowledge, the cultural understanding, and the cross-cultural communication competence cultivation. Based on wether the extensive reading materials are given, this stage has two types. One is the short kind of post-reaing stage in the first period reading class,the other one is long kind of post-reaing stage in the second period reading class. In the first kind, the useful teaching strategies are designing some retelling activities for the cultural knowledge and designing some simple discussion activities for the cultural understanding. In the second kind, the useful teaching strategies are deep discussion activities after reading more extensive materials on various opinions or another section written by the same writher for cultural understanding, and doing a role-play after reading extensive reading materials for the real cross-cultural ccommunication competence cultivation.Furthermore, it also pointed out the limitations of the present study and then put forward some suggestions for further researches in this field.