A Study On English Culture Teaching In Senior High Schools

With the deepening globalization and integration of world economy,international exchanges between different cultures are becoming more and more frequent.In order to respond to the challenge,cultural awareness is set as one of the objectives of English proficiency in English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(2003),which shows that we should integrate culture teaching with language teaching.Under this context,the students and teachers in Zhengzhou No.16 Middle School are studied by using questionnaire,interview and classroom observation in order to figure out the following questions:(1)What are the attitudes of teachers and students to culture teaching?(2)What is the current situation of culture teaching in senior high schools?(3)What are the major factors that affect culture teaching?According to the analysis of data collected,the author concludes that: firstly,the teachers and students hold a positive attitude to culture teaching.Secondly,the teachers seldom conduct culture teaching and the students spend little time in culture learning,causing students’ poor mastery of culture knowledge.Thirdly,the pressure of the exam,the lack of authentic communicative environment,the teachers’ cultural quality and ability to conduct culture teaching,are the major factors affecting culture teaching.On the basis of the analysis,the author puts forward the following suggestions on how to improve the current situation.First of all,the teachers should enhance their ability of culture teaching and cultural quality through self-study and training.In addition,it is of importance to increase more culture content in English test.Last,communicative atmosphere is helpful to students’ culture learning.At the same time,the author also analyzes the limitation of this research and puts forward some suggestions and prospect on future research.