A Study Of The Implementation Of Cultural Literacy In Japanese Curriculum And Its Teaching Strategies In Senior High Schools

In the 21^st century,many countries are adopting new education policies to meet the challenge of the new century.In order to further enhance the national competitive strength and improve education quality,our country also carried out a new round of basic education curriculum reform at the beginning of the new century.This reform is of great importance if the strategy of rejuvenating China through science,education and talents is taken into consideration.As a key word in this reform,literacy not only represents the quality education in China,but reflects the curriculum goals which emphasized by the reformers that we shoulddevelop students'"relatively stable and basic knowledge,ability,skills and values that meet the needs of the era".In the 21^st century,information develops fast and international communication occurs frequently.In the background of globalization,foreign languages have become one of the indispensable means of communication.The old foreign language teaching styles cannot undertake the task of cultivating foreign language literacy of 21^st century citizens.Countries start to introduce national standards of foreign language teaching to deal with the new situation.Language is the carrier of cultural transmission and communication tools.The relationship among language,culture and communication has become the main issue of foreign language teaching study.Foreign language teaching policies of other countries integrate culture,communication and learning strategies to foreign language teaching.Foreign language curriculum standard in China also takes the development of students'"comprehensive language using ability"as the overall goal of the curriculum.The content of the curriculumstandard includes five aspects,which arelanguage knowledge,language skills,cultural literacy?or cultural consciousness?,emotional attitude and learning strategies.It is more difficult to achieve the goal of cultural literacy than that of knowledge and skills.In addition,cultural literacy is more often ignored in practice.How to realize the goalof cultural literacyis an urgent problem for educators.In view of the parts related to cultural literacy in the Japanese language Curriculum standard,this study interprets the goals,contents,teaching suggestions and evaluation suggestions of cultural literacy through text analysis,and then analyzes the representation of cultural literacy in the experimental textbook.The study employs questionnaire and interview to understand teachers'understanding and attitude of cultural literacy goal.Classroom observation is also employed to reveal how teachers implement the cultural literacy goal in teaching.The study explores factors that influence the implementation of cultural literacygoal through data analysis.Thus,suggestions are proposedto improve cultural literacy in Japanese teaching.The main findings of this study are as follows:First,features of Japanese cultural literacy teaching arecognition,centrality,randomness and unconsciousness.Second,cultural literacy is not well embodied in classroom teaching.This is supported by the insufficiency of nonverbal behavior in classroom,teachers'greaterdiscourse power than students,uniform classroom teaching style,and lack ofevaluationson classroomactivities.Third,factors that influenceimplementationof cultural literacy areinsufficiency of cultural literacy theory,the influence of curriculum material,insufficiency of related contents of cultural literacy in teaching,the deviation of teachers'understanding of cultural literacy,the obvious differences between teachers'cultural literacy,students'experience and their language level,pressure from entrance exam to universities.Forth,suggestions for teaching are to clearly define teachers'role in teaching process,to further teachers'understanding and change their attitude of cultural literacy,to change the type of classroom teaching,to attach great importance to teaching design and learning evaluation,to improve the environment to make it beneficial to cultural literacy implementation,to develop curriculum resources which integrates language teaching and cultural literacy.It is expected that this study will enrich Japanese language teaching and culture teaching theory.The findings of the study will further enrich cultural literacyteaching strategies,and help high school teachers understand Japanese curriculum standards.The study will also provide reliable data for the revision of high school Japanese curriculum standard.