Culture Penetration And English Teaching In Senior Schools-From The Perspective Of New Curriculum Standards

In traditional English teaching, much attention is paid to basic knowledge about thelanguage, such as vocabulary, phrases, sentence structure, grammatical rules and soon, while the cultural information of the language is often ignored. As everyoneknows, with the rapid development of technology and society, the globalization is themain-stream of world development. In this global village, the contact between peoplesof different cultures becomes more and more frequent. Especially developing learners'intercultural communicative competence is drawing more attention in Englishteaching.The inseparable relationship between culture and language definitely shows theincreasing necessity of cultural education in English teaching. Along with the newlypublished "English Curriculum Standards for Senior Highs", integrating cultureteaching in senior high school English classrooms has become important;culture hasbeen listed as one of the teaching contents and teaching goal. Senior high students arerequired to have a deeper understanding about learners' native culture, the targetculture and the awareness of globalization. Learning or experiencing more than oneculture can fulfill those aims. Through learning the differences between learners'native culture and the target culture, the learner can gradually reduce ethnocentrismand prejudice, and pick up an intercultural perspective. Accordingly, if secondaryschool English classrooms incorporate culture teaching as a major element, it willhelp learners acquire both communicative ability and intercultural perspectives.Our ELT should be a practical and effective procedure in developing students'intercultural communicative competence, which is almost ignored in senior highschools because of the test-oriented teaching aim, the different levels of the teachers'quality and other causes. As a result, students who have learned English for manyyears have no sense of the cultural differences between the target languages and theirnative languages;therefore the language loses its function and nature in such classedand the students who come out of those classes are, of course, "dumb" and "deaf" inusing the language.The author of this thesis made a survey of current cultural teaching in threeSenior High Schools of Shandong,questionnaires (see appendix I and II) were used asinstruments to get data for this research. Two questionnaires were designed forteachers and students respectively. The purpose of this study is to determine teachers'and students' attitudes towards culture instruction and find out teachers' currentperformances in class in Senior English, as well as learners' acquiring communicativecompetence and cultural awareness. The results of the survey showed that cultureteaching has not gained its due place in English teaching. It mainly focuses on:Firstly, the idea of traditional English teaching has taken root in the hearts of themiddle school English teachers, they laid stress on students' language competence butneglected their cross-cultural communicative competence, and they are hesitant abouttheir views on how to teach the English culture although they have come to realizethat culture is an important aspect of language teaching. Secondly, the previous seniorhigh English syllabus designers have laid more stress on linguistic skills andcommunicative competence than cultural competence. Therefore, there has been agreat lack of information in English textbooks on sociolinguistic norms andconventions, such as customs, habits and behavior patterns of native speakers.Compared with language elements, culture elements are still subsidiary and of lowpriority. Therefore senior high students feel quite bored with and little motivated forlearning English in the traditional grammar-driven class. Besides, students' culturalcompetence can hardly meet the needs of international communications: "culturalmistakes" are found here and there, both inside and outside English classes. Thirdly,most senior high school teachers have not yet realized the importance of buildingcultural awareness of the students, which is the biggest problem for the culturaleducation to be carried out in senior high schools' EFT. Moreover, they lack creativityas well as sensitivity to the importance of culture teaching in language teaching andknowledge about the target culture. Lastly, regarding recognition of non-verbalbehaviors, both teachers and students know little about their importance inintercultural communication. Seldom do teachers try to sharpen students' awarenessof non-verbal cues in communication.Therefore, the thesis attempts to put forward some constructive suggestionsconcerning how to integrate cultural contents properly into English teaching in seniorhigh school, that is to say, English teachers ought to teach cultural knowledge on theirown initiative in order to enrich and improve English teaching, and also to buildstudents language capacity to communicate in a correct, proper and decent way, sothat they will be able to meet the demands of the New English Curriculum Standards.The ultimate goal of culture teaching in English learning is to bring about learners'internal changes and benefit their all-round development.