Incorporating Cultural Knowledge In Senior English Class To Improve Students' Communicative Competence

The idea of teaching culture is nothing new to foreign language teachers. In many cases, teaching culture has meant focusing a few lessons on holidays, customary clothing, folk songs, and food. While these topics may be useful, without a broader context or frame they offer little in the way of enriching linguistic or social insight—especially if a goal of language instruction is to enable students to function effectively in another language and society. Understanding the cultural context of day-to-day conversational conventions such as greetings, farewells, forms of address, thanking, making requests, and giving or receiving compliments means more than just being able to produce grammatical sentences. It means knowing what is appropriate to say to whom, and in what situations, and it means understanding the beliefs and values represented by the various forms and usages of the language.Culture must be fully incorporated as a vital component of language learning. Foreign language teachers should identify key cultural items in every aspect of the language that they teach. Students can be successful in speaking a foreign language only if cultural issues are an inherent part of the curriculum.However, language' teachers used to pay more attention to grammatical competence than conversational competence, and culture teaching is usually not involved in the language practice.The aim of this thesis is (1) to investigate the foreign cultural competence of Chinese secondary school students; (2) to find out how well new teaching strategies in culture teaching will improve the students' communicative competence.