The Influence Of Acculturation On English Language Teaching In Senior Middle School

English, as a most widely used language, plays an increasing important role in the international communication. As a result, more and more linguists have turn to the research on the applied linguistics. Many of them have realized that culture gap has become a big barrier in the intercultural communication and made many theories on culture and language. However, the present English teaching is still characterized by learning language knowledge and separating the language from culture because of the influence of college-entrance examination.Based on the theories on the culture and language, this paper is aiming at emphasizing the importance of culture learning in traditional language classroom. Based on a research project, the researcher examined 60 high school students'beliefs of language-and-culture learning by means of a questionnaire and interviews. Findings indicate that students in senior middle school have strong beliefs of culture learning although their time and energy used to learn culture is limited. Therefore, this paper points out that cultural components should be penetrated properly into the English teaching in senior middle school. That is to say, English teachers should teach cultural knowledge as well as language knowledge simultaneously so that it can not only arouse the students'interest in learning English, help them to communicate with English natives properly, but also meet the needs of foreign language talents in the society.The paper consists of five parts: Part one is an introduction, showing the importance of culture teaching in foreign language teaching.Part two concentrates on the relationships between language and culture.Part three gives a detailed description of the survey conducted to find out the beliefs of senior middle school students on culture learning and the effects of acculturation on ELT.Part four reveals the findings by means of the questionnaires and interviews.Part five makes a conclusion about the whole thesis, pointing out that acculturation is an effective way to foster the language learning.