An Analysis Of Middle School Student’s English Cultural Knowledge-An Empirical Study Based On Go For It

In foreign language learning and teaching, the importance of culture is well addressed by many researchers. For language learners, to achieve the comprehensive language competence of a foreign language, it is necessary to learn its culture. The English Curriculum Standards (2012) requires the cultivation of students’ cultural awareness as one of the teaching goals and it advocates the unity of the functionality and humanism in language education. Despite the growing emphasis on culture learning and teaching, students’ communicative competence in English is not very satisfying. Cultural mistakes and failures in cross-cultural communication are easy to find. What is more, some English teachers are not clear with the purpose of teaching culture and do not have enough knowledge about how to implement culture teaching. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the current situation and provide pragmatic suggestions for English teachers.This thesis analyzes middle school students’ cultural knowledge to reflect students’ strength and weakness in culture learning. It attempts to deal with the following research questions:(1) What is the target cultural content in middle school English textbook and how is the proportion of different categories? (2) What is the current situation of students’mastery of cultural knowledge after the learning of Go for it (Book 1 to Book 5)? (3) What are the factors that lead to the current situation? The author first analyzes the cultural content in the textbook; then carries out a culture test and a survey in the form of questionnaire among 120 Grade 9 students.8 teachers from the same school are interviewed for possible factors that lead to the current situation.The study yields the following findings:firstly, the richness and amount of the cultural content provided in the textbook is in general satisfying. Secondly, students show a good knowledge of the target cultural knowledge but they are not able to integrate their cultural knowledge with language knowledge well. Thirdly, the major problems and hindrance in the current culture learning and teaching can be summarized into the following:the absence of a proper evaluation system for students, the lack of professional training for teacher and the inadequacy in opportunities of cross-cultural activities. Based on the results, suggestions for culture learning and teaching are proposed at the end of the thesis.