Cultural Knowledge Teaching And Discourse Construction In Warming Up Section In High School English Classroom

With the urgent need to improve English teaching in the new curriculum reform in senior schools,teaching language is not only to teach a language,but improves students’ language application abilities on the basis of cultivating students’ multi-cultural abilities.Having a better understanding of cultural knowledge deepens language learning.Teachers should establish the awareness of mutual promotion and infiltration between language and cultural knowledge in English teaching.They should guide students to learn Chinese and foreign culture through exploration,experience,and comparison in order to realize internalization of culture into cognition,behaviors and characters with correct value orientation.However,high school students learn cultural knowledge mainly through teaching materials and teacher discourse.Since teachers are the designers and organizers in classroom teaching,teacher discourse plays a vital part in organizing,guiding and encouraging students’ learning.The quality of teacher discourse is directly related to the achievement of teaching objectives.The general goal of this paper is to explore the process of cultural knowledge instruction and construction in Chinese high school English classroom in teaching Warming Up section.To be more specific,there are three research questions:1)What are the perceptions of students and teachers in senior English class for cultural knowledge in Warming up section?2)In teaching cultural knowledge in Warming up section,how do the teachers in senior high school design teaching activities and present contents in English classes?3)In different teaching activities,what classroom discourses do the English teachers apply to construct cultural knowledge for the students?Based on the theories of teaching cultural knowledge and discourse analysis,through interviews with students and English teachers from Senior One and Senior Two,it is found that teachers and students think poor of the cultural knowledge teaching in Warming up section.Teachers’ traditional teaching modes,teacher discourse and knowledge literacy affect the effectiveness of teaching cultural knowledge.From classroom observation on Senior One and Senior Two,senior high school teachers tend to design teaching activities and present contents in English class in a multimodal way,with discourse mode as the main mode,PPT,audio and video as the auxiliary mode.However,too much PPT pictures reduce students’ language and thinking abilities.Students act as listeners,viewers,and observers.Teacherdiscourse cannot play a good role in teaching for too much quantity and display questions but fewer encouraging and guiding feedback.Some teacher discourse is rather casual and nonstandard.The analysis finds that high school English teachers present cultural knowledge in a multimodal way,and construct cultural knowledge to students by enriching effective teaching discourse.Teacher discourse makes the infiltration of language and culture consciousness more obvious,which promotes the cultivation and development of high school students’ cross-cultural knowledge and ability.It is proposed that teachers should make rational use of multimodal discourse to present cultural knowledge,focus on the effectiveness of teacher discourse,and pay attention to the self-improvement of teachers’ teaching abilities and professional knowledge,so as to provide some references and suggestions for the effectiveness of cultural knowledge teaching and the current reform of English teaching in senior high school.