The Cultural Introduction To The Intensive Reading

There are diverse propositions and arguments about the pedagogical treatment of culture, and how to teach culture in foreign language education is a problem faced by language educators all over the world. This thesis is also concerned with the incorporation and contribution of the teaching of culture, but it's a teaching experiment in the college English classroom, arguing that cultural introduction is an effective way to promote the students' cultural awareness and English proficiency.This paper reports a quasi-experiment conducted in the biology majors of Shandong Normal University on the cultural introduction to 60 Chinese undergraduates in the English class for about 19 weeks. One of the objectives of the study is to provide the students with more information about the target culture to promote their awareness and appreciation of it. A second objective of the study is to illustrate if it is possible and productive to integrate cultural introduction into the college intensive reading class. Furthermore, because the subjects involved are a group of general students for whom to fulfill graduation requirements is one of their major tasks, the present study specifically seeks information and analysis on how the introduction of culture knowledge affects students' desire to study English and their achievements, which is our central concern in this paper.During the process of language learning, the students in the experimental class are given the opportunity of being exposed to the English culture in and after the class, whereas the students in the control class are not. In the end of that semester, a questionnaire on culture is distributed to 60 students, with 30 students being selected randomly from the experimental group and 30 from the control group. Their results in the questionnaire and their scores in the English final examination are included in the process of data analysis done by SPSS (11.0). In this way the effectiveness of the cultural introduction and the correlation between cultural introduction and language performance can be explored.We find that the majority of the students in the experiment hold favorable attitude toward cultural introduction and the results of the research analysis testify the effectiveness of the cultural introduction: It not only helps improve students' culturalVIawareness, but also contributes to the development of their interest in learning English and the cultivation of their ability in using the language, thus enhancing their overall communicative competence.This thesis consists of six parts, including the Introduction and the Conclusion. The introduction presents the research background of culture learning and teaching, the main issues involved in the research. The first two chapters are the theoretical considerations, setting a foundation stone for the conduction of the experiment and the data analysis in Chapter Three and Four.In Chapter One, firstly, the three categories of the definitions of culture, namely, culture as knowledge, culture as behavior and culture as meaning are reviewed, and then the profound correlation between language and culture is explored, demonstrating why the learning of culture should constitute an integral part of language acquisition. After that the treatment of target culture in the history of foreign language education home and abroad and the benefits of culture teaching are presented in detail. Obviously in theory, the discussions on culture in the history indicate the existence of a persistent movement concerned with culture teaching, and in practice, the importance of teaching foreign culture has been widely recognized. It's true that the western language educators have made great efforts to pose the question of how to teach culture in language programs. Through introducing the progress abroad and making new research, the Chinese language educators have brought about much progress in the field of foreign language and culture education in China. The benefits of cultural teaching are also listed to show that some problems r...