A Survey And Research On The English Cultural Background Knowledge Of Students In Rural Area Of Heilongjiang Province

With the acceleration of globalization, connection between nations becomes increasingly close, especially the communication between cultures, which serves as the foundation of understanding and toleration among different nations. As a global language, English plays a significant role in cross-cultural communication. Therefore, it is of great importance to acquire cultural knowledge of English-speaking countries. Accordingly, with the change of the trend of times, the education philosophy of English also changed, and the newly reformed syllabus of English has taken cultural aims into its consideration. Nevertheless, what is the effect of culture teaching in the practice of English education in high school? Has the goal of the newly reformed syllabus been achieved? To what extent do students, especially rural students acquire English cultural background knowledge? In order to find out answers to the questions mentioned above, the author conducted a survey and research on English cultural background knowledge of students in Fangzheng No.1 High School, which is the only senior high school in the county town. Like other county town of Heilongjiang Province, Fangzheng is an agriculture-centered county with ordinary level of education. In most rural areas of the northeast, there is imbalance of supply and demand for education resources. Due to the scarcity of higher education resources, the competition of entrance examination for high school is extremely fierce. Hence, students of the sole high school is relatively representative, thus the sample of research in this thesis is typical. Questionnaires and test paper are delivered to students at grade 11 and all the 12 English teachers of Fangzheng No.1 High School. The reason why students at grade 11 are chosen to be the subject is that after nearly 5years of English learning, they are supposed to master cultural knowledge to some extent. Students at grade 12 who are engaged in the preparation for NMET have little time to join the survey. To avoid interference factor, three classes in the middle level are selected to be the subject. With the help of statistical software SPSS, the survey data are collected and processed, which leads to the exploration of rural students'acquisition of English cultural knowledge. Data analysis includes quality and validity analysis of questionnaire, correlation analysis of questionnaire score and test score, as well as variance analysis between the performances of boys and girls. The findings from the research show that rural students perform badly in the cultural test though they hold positive attitudes towards English cultural learning. Boys and girls also showed divergence in their performances. Reasons for these phenomena are various, such as teachers'quality, individual interest, etc, which will be discussed in detail in the paper. Aiming at these problems, countermeasures based upon theories like Acculturation and Input are also advanced as references. Specific measures proposed around these theories include the change of classroom setting, exploration of textbooks, application of multimedia etc.