An Experimental Study On Cultural Introduction In English Reading Teaching Of Rural Senior High School Students

Nowadays for the teachers of English, it is necessary to pay much attention to theeducation on the society and culture of English-speaking countries in order to meet thedemands of globalization and the international communication of China. In fact, mostlanguage teachers have attached great importance to culture teaching and have found outsome effective ways of culture teaching, which can arouse students’ interest and help thempromote the reading ability. Up till now, many researches on cultural background teachinghave been conducted for a long time. Meanwhile, many scholars and teachers havepublished a large number of books and articles related to culture teaching. However, few oftheir researches are connected with cultural introduction in English reading teaching ofSenior High School students, especially the students in rural areas so far to the knowledgeof the author.Therefore, this study aims to find out the common difficulties and barriers in cultureteaching of the Senior High School students in rural areas in Taixing and search for theeffective ways of cultural introduction in English reading teaching of rural senior highschool students so as to improve students’ English reading ability. It intends to maketeachers and students realize the importance of culture knowledge in readingcomprehension and offer specific and effective ways to culture teaching and learning inorder to improve students’ reading ability.Based on the different definitions of language and culture, as well as the relatedstudies on the relationship between culture background knowledge and reading teaching,the author first conducts the pre-test and the questionnaire in the experimental class and thecontrol class in order to find out the common barriers existing in current culture teaching insenior high school in rural areas. The results show that most of the students are interestedin English culture and they think that learning English culture has a positive effect on theirlanguage study. However, there are some common barriers existing in culture learning. Forexample, some students have limited time and energy for culture learning and they have too heavy burden to conduct culture learning; some students think it difficult for them toachieve suitable culture learning materials due to the poor economic conditions of theirfamilies.Then, the students of the experimental class are given a systematical culture teachingtaught by the author, especially the culture background knowledge teaching for aboutsixteen weeks. Concretely speaking, during the whole process of the experiment, four mainapproaches are used in cultural background knowledge teaching and learning: comparativeanalysis approach, additional reading approach, interactive communicative approach andexperience approach. In order to examine the effects of this experiment, the readingcomprehension post-test is conducted in both the experimental class and the control classafter the experiment.According to the analysis of the statistics, it indicates that after sixteen weeks’experiment of developing the students’ cultural background knowledge, the students obtaina lot of culture information by these approaches, which are helpful to raise the students’interest in culture learning so as to improve their English reading ability greatly.At last, the author proposes some suggestions in culture teaching and learning basedon the reflection on the current situation of English culture teaching.