Teaching Culture In English Teaching At Senior High Schools

Nowadays, cultural communication is becoming more and more frequent and specific requirements for improving cultural awareness is set clearly in the New English Curriculum Standards. Consequently, culture teaching manifests its necessity and urgency.Exploring the relationship between language and culture, analyzing the study of culture teaching both at home and abroad, employing classroom teaching cases, using Fudan Senior High School as its case study, this thesis attempts to discuss the issue of teaching culture in English teaching based on investigation and experiments.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one introduces the background of the study, discusses the theoretical basis and practical necessity of the study and explains the significance of the paper. Chapter two gives a general introduction to the relevant theories. This part introduces the development and trend of culture teaching domestically and globally, with an attempt to know the situation of culture teaching, thus giving a theoretical support to this thesis. Chapter three mainly examines the current situation of culture teaching based on Oxford English (Shanghai Edition) in Fudan Senior High School. In this chapter, some possible cultural teaching modes in teaching reading and vocabulary in Fudan are presented.Based on the surveys of cultural awareness and culture teaching among both teachers and students, this part investigates and analyzes the problems teachers and students encounter in culture teaching and exploit culture teaching strategies. Chapter four mainly deals with the cultural experiments. In this chapter, the author selects typical culture teaching classes, introduces the whole process of culture teaching during one year including preparation stage, the whole experimental stage and the conclusion of the experiment. The study draws a natural conclusion that culture teaching plays a very important role in improving English teaching. The last chapter, which is the conclusive part of the dissertation, reflects on the study and reviews the teaching contents, teaching methods and forms of assessment, indicating that teachers should attach importance to culture teaching in their daily work, absorb culture knowledge and cultivate students' cultural awareness and cross-culture ability.