The Effect Of The Education Of Cultural Background Knowledge On The Improvement Of Senior Students' Reading

One of the most extraordinary characteristics of the newly released textbooks is to emphasize acculturation during teaching process, which is an effective way to develop students'cultural awareness. English teaching in middle schools shouldn't be separated from English-speaking countries'cultural environment, but should give enough attention to the integration between the English language and its culture. We are fully aware that it is essential to introduce Western culture to students systematically during the basic teaching stage. Students'familiarity with Western culture will assist them to understand the material they are reading help them to use cultural schema to communicate with the author. This thesis puts forward the hypotheses that reading combined with culture education based on cultural-linguistics theory, will better develop comprehension competence. Thus, it suggests that students should be provided with information about Western cultural background, including customs, ways of thinking, values, beliefs, etc. through reading training. All this will help facilitate reading comprehension; The experiment is conducted as an attempt to justify that the introduction of English culture to the teaching of reading can enrich students'knowledge of Western cultures, and help them to read between the lines as well.The paper is consists of five parts.Part one is an introduction, stating the importance of culture education in foreign language teaching.Part two mainly concentrates on the definition of language and culture and the relations between them. It also illustrates what reading is and the relative reading models.Part three focus on the course of present study. The author introduces the subjects, the procedures, the materials and the data collection and analysis of the study.Part four is the result of the experiment and discussion. which accounts for the requirements for the teachers and how to input cultural knowledge to the students.Part five concludes the research and gives some advice to the teachers on how to improve students'reading ability further as well as some implications on the further research in this field.