Culture Teaching Strategies Applicable At Secondary English Instructional Level--An Experimental Research In Beijing No.50 Senior High School

Nowadays in Western countries, it is a commonplace in language pedagogy to stress the importance of culture teaching due to the close relationship between language and culture. Moreover, many studies and researches show that systematic and effective culture teaching strategies could lead to significant improvement in learners' pragmatic competence, communicative competence and cultural awareness. In China, senior high English teachers and students have realized that foreign language teaching with pure linguistic form cannot meet the new demands of social development. A survey among Chinese senior high school learners and teachers reveals that most of them are unsatisfied with the current culture teaching in English classrooms and are in strong support of the systematic and effective culture teaching. Besides, the senior high teachers are yearning for a set of well-planned effective culture teaching strategies.Enlightened by the research literature concerning culture teaching and the demands on enhancing learners' cultural awareness by English Curriculum Standards, the author of the thesis conducted a four-month cultural teaching experiment in Beijing No. 50 Senior High School. The purpose of the experiment was to verify both quantitatively & qualitatively whether the culture teaching strategies offered by the author can aid learners' acquiring pragmatic competence, communicative competence and cultural awareness. The results of the experiment showed that learners in the experimental group demonstrated significantly higher pragmatic competence, communicative competence, culture awareness than the control group and were moresensitive to the differences between their native culture and the target culture. Therefore, a tentative conclusion can be drawn that systematic and effective culture teaching strategies can help learners obtain pragmatic competence, communicative competence and cultural awareness. Besides, implications for the culture teaching and learning at senior high English level are proposed at the end of the thesis.