An Experiment Of Cultural Teaching In The EFLT Of Secondary Vocational Schools

With the globalization of the world economy and the popularization of the international exchange, China is in desperate need of people who are familiar with foreign cultures and capable of communicating accurately and appropriately in intercultural situation. Cultural knowledge, culture understanding or comprehension as well as the insight and ability of using a foreign language should be included in the aims of language teaching. English teaching should focus not only on the language forms but on their communicative competence in various cultural backgrounds as well. Cultural knowledge needs to be incorporated into language classes. Teaching culture in a language class to cultivate students'cultural awareness and develop their intercultural communicative competence has become a new objective for English teaching in China.Since Lado introduced culture teaching into foreign language teaching in 1958, this new field has been developing rapidly. In 1980s, Chinese scholars began to make experiments in universities and schools, and various papers and works on cultural teaching were gradually published. However, the corresponding experiments of cultural teaching in vocational schools are rarely done. Teachers there lack experience on how to incorporate culture in vocational schools. Based on the reality of vocational schools and students'English proficiency, the author of this paper makes an experiment of cultural teaching in the EFLT of Secondary Vocational Schools. The aims of the experiment are to find out some problems in contemporary English teaching, and offer some suggestions to cultural teaching in language classes. More importantly, doing an experiment can help teachers improve their teaching methods, enrich their teaching experience, and benefit the students in English learning.In the experiment, two parallel classes are chosen to be the subjects. English teaching in the experimental class is combined with relevant cultural knowledge. The control class is still taught with the traditional English teaching method. In the process of the experiment, different theories and approaches of cultural teaching are practiced to find the most feasible ones for vocational schools. Consequently, five kinds of culture-oriented approaches are adopted in the experiment and proved effectively: increasing the input of cultural knowledge by the full use of multi-media and internet resources; organizing proper culture-oriented classroom activities; making cultural comparisons; digging into the core of culture; strengthening extracurricular English activities. Data analyzing of the experiment proves that increasing the input of cultural knowledge and enhancing students'interests of acquiring foreign culture can foster students'positive cultural attitudes and critical cultural awareness, by which means the students'intercultural communicative competence is enhanced. Furthermore, incorporating culture into language teaching can improve the students'English proficiency.The paper consists of eight parts. Chapter One makes a brief review of the study on Cultural teaching in recent years both at home and abroad. In Chapter Two, the reasons for adopting cultural teaching in EFLT are elaborated. Theoretically, language and culture are inseparably connected from the beginning. In our lives, Cultural learning is required by the society. Meantime, it meets the demand of vocational schools'teaching aims---- to cultivate qualified workers. An experiment of cultural teaching in EFLT is made to find approaches of cultural teaching in vocational schools. This section also explains the underlying theories based on which the teaching experiment is done. The teacher should make clear the course design theories: the aims, the principles, the strategies, the contents and the outcomes of cultural teaching. In Chapter Three, the methodology used in the experiment, including the procedures, subjects and schedules, is introduced. Chapter Four sets forth the preparations made before the experiment. Teacher's role in cultural teaching is made clear, and suitable teaching materials are chosen. Chapter Five is the process of the experiment. There is one experimental class and one control class. Cultural teaching is performed through culture-oriented classroom activities in the experimental class from Sep, 2005 to Jan, 2007. Ways of data collecting are introduced. In Chapter Six, appropriate testing measures are employed to collect and analyze experiment data. Chapter Seven declares the results and discusses problems and limitations of the experiment. The data shows that students'cultural awareness, intercultural communicative competence, and language proficiency in the experimental class are improved faster than those of the control class. The advantages of cultural teaching are mentioned, and the problems and limitations of the experiment are discussed as well. In the conclusion part, a brief review of the experiment is made. The thesis covers the contents mentioned above and offered proposals for cultural teaching in the EFLT.Research significance may there be of this paper, limitations also exist in the study. First, the situations of Vocational Schools are different from senior middle schools. The approaches of cultural teaching discussed in this paper may be infeasible. Second,the evaluation system the author offered only covers written cultural knowledge, but cannot evaluate intercultural communicative competence, which may influence the effect of the experiment of cultural teaching.