Teaching Culture In College English Reading Course

Nowdays it is generally acknowledged by the linguists and language educators that language and culture are inseparable and mutually influenced. Language teachers have become increasingly aware of the great importance of the contribution and incorporation of teaching culture into the foreign language classroom. This thesis is concerned with the feasibility and effectiveness of teaching culture in college English reading class. Through the empirical study, the thesis mainly solves the following problems: (1) why teaching culture should be integrated into English reading course; (2) what cultural content should be taught; (3) how teaching culture is integrated into the college English reading course; (4) whether teaching culture can benefit both the cultivation of students'cultural awareness and the development of their reading comprehension.This thesis reports a quasi-experiment in college English reading course for about 18 weeks. The experiment was conducted in the computer science and technology majors of Shandong TV University. Forty-five freshmen participated. Another forty-five students were used to be control group. One of the objectives of the expriment is to cultivate learners'cultural awareness and competence by providing more information about the target culture in college English reading course. The second one, by analyzing the results of the social-culture test, is to testify the effects of teaching culture on cultivating the students'cultural awareness. The third objective, by analyzing the results of the reading tests, is to testify effects of teaching culture on improving learners'reading comprehension. According to the major findings of the teaching experiment, the author povides pedagogical suggestions for college English teaching.According to the analysis of the statistics processed by SPSS from the results of the experiment, teaching culture is confirmed to be feasible and effective in college English reading class. This teaching culture experiment not only helps to improve students'cultural awareness, but also makes a contribution to the development of their interest in learning English, thus improving their reading comprehension. This thesis consists of seven parts including introduction and conclusion.The introduction presents the background, significance and objectives of the study.Chapter One introduces related studies on the effects of cultural knowledge on English reading comprehension. All the studies show that the scholars and language educators have been increasingly aware of the effects of culture in reading comprehension.Chapter Two is the theoretical foundation of this thesis. The author, firstly, reviewed the definition of culture and reading. Then the author explored the relationships between language and culture, reading comprehension and culture. In the end, the author explained the importance of culture in language learning and reading comprehension. All the related theories implicate that it is absolutely necessary and important to incorporate teaching culture into English reading course.Chapter Three is considerations of teaching culture in the experiment including principles, contents and approaches to teaching cuture.Chapter Four and Chapter Five are the main body of this thesis.Chapter Four is concerned with the research methodology, including experimental objectives, participants, instruments, procedures, the collection and analysis of the data and limitations of the research. The data is processed by SPSS10.0, through which means, standard deviations, t-value, p-value and Pearson correlation analysis, independent-samples t-test and paired-samples t-test are examined.Chapter Five presents major findings of the research, and puts forward pedagogical suggestions for teaching culture in college English teaching.The last part is a conclusion of the whole thesis.To sum up, the thesis has presented a quasi-experiment on teaching culture in college English reading course. The results indicate that teaching culture should become an integral part of foreign language teaching and that teaching culture really has a positive effect on the students'language study. Teaching culture is productive and rewarding in the improvement of their cultural awareness and reading comprehension. Therefore the peculiarities of the study lie in the fact that : 1) the teaching culture is processed in college English reading course; 2) the main concern is the effects of teaching culture on the cultivation of the students'cultural awareness and improvement of reading comprehension; 3) according to the findings of the teaching experiment, the author provides practically effective ways of teaching culture and pedagogical suggestions for further study.