A Research On The Effectiveness Of Teaching Culture Via Multimedia In EFL Classroom

The advents of information age and increasing international exchange have made foreign languages learning more and more important. The importance of understanding target language culture and developing cross-cultural communication skills is an increasingly acknowledged aspect in the teaching of foreign languages. Yet how to incorporate the cultureinto foreign language teaching remains unsettled. As the national syllabus of college English emphasizes the learners' communicative competence in language learning, concerns for learners' communicative needs have prompted language educators to reconsider the conventional treatment of teaching cultureand to search for new approaches to teaching language and culture.On the other hand multimedia technology, which is characterized by a combination of graphic, textual, audio and video functions, is superior to any other medium in its devastatingly huge mass of information, high speed of information exchanging and partaking of information resources especially after the computer connecting with the Internet. While foreign language teaching requires a great deal of language environments and multimedia naturally becomes the best choice of information programming.The thesis is intended to testify theoretically and experimentally that it is a more effective approach to teach culture via multimedia in EFL than just with the traditional instruction approach.The whole dissertation is divided into six chapters.Chapter I is a routine introduction. The chapter sets forth purpose of the study and need for the study including literature review and brings forward the research questions and hypothesis of the thesis.Chapter II begins from the explanation of the concept of culture and the major point is the relationship between language teaching and culture teaching in the light of relationship between language and culture. And it also applies to the importance and goal of culture teaching.Chapter III deals with the history of application of multimedia in foreign language teaching and distinguishes several concepts which are prone to be mixed. In addition, it is indicated why multimedia is used for cultureteaching in TEFL from theoretical perspectives.Chapter IV is the demonstration of two approaches in details including advantages of multimedia teaching and disadvantages of traditional lecture teaching. There is also a primary exploration in pedagogy through the changes of teacher's role brought by multimedia approach.Chapter V redes the method of the experiment detailedly and analyzes the results.Chapter VI draws conclusions and answers the research question. That is: to teach culture via multimedia in EFL classroom is a more effective approach theoretically and experimentally.