Culture Teaching In Reading Course Of Senior Middle School

In teaching English as a foreign language, the importance of culture teaching has been widely recognized. The present thesis stresses that culture teaching is essential in reading course of Senior Middle School. The teaching of language and the teaching of culture are of the same importance in English teaching.In traditional English teaching, language knowledge is paid too much attention to, words, sentences and grammar are taken as the dominant factors, having nothing to do with cultural elements of that particular language. English teachers neglect culture teaching in English classes. As a result, many students have learned a considerably large number of English words by heart and they can make grammatically correct sentences, but their actual communicative competence proves to be quite disappointing. That's why, in the real communicative situations, the students' "cultural mistakes" occur, which often form a very serious hurdle to intercultural communication.In the early 1990s, the idea of culture teaching has been embodied in JEFC and SEFC books. English New Curricular stipulates that the aim of "culture knowledge,culture understanding and intercultural communicative competence" should be included in English teaching. More and more English teachers in China have gradually realized the importance of the role of culture awareness in the process of English teaching.Language is the medium of culture. A great number of tests show that the hurdle of English reading comprehension doesn't only exist in vocabulary and grammar, but also exists in background knowledge and cultural information. So, English teachers should try their best to make students get familiar with English culture and acquire cultural competence as much as possible. In reading comprehension, even if the students have a good command of linguistic competence, misunderstanding always occurs in the case of lacking cultural competence and thus neglecting the cultural differences between mother tongue and target language. So, enhancing the teaching of cultural background knowledge, especially paying much attention to the intension and extension of English vocabulary, can help the students predict the content of the text and grasp the main idea of the text easily as well as quickly. It is useful to help the students enlarge their scope of knowledge, improve their cultural awareness and therefore improve their communicative competence through the intentional cultural infiltration in reading course of Senior Middle School.The present thesis is made up of six chapters as follows:Chapter One serves as an introduction stating the aim and significance of culture teaching, the present situation of Senior English teaching , especially reading course in our country, the research work of English teaching and comprehensive reading course in and out of our country. This part also shows the organization of the thesis.Chapter Two presents the culture teaching and comprehensive reading course in Senior Middle School, including the definition of culture, the relationship between language and culture, the goals, principles and contents of culture teaching.Chapter Three conducts a contrastive experiment, and analyzes the result of the experiment.Chapter Four explores some ways of culture teaching in comprehensive reading course of Senior Middle School, including vocabulary learning, Chinese and English culture comparison, culture errors analysis, English and American literature appreciation...