An Introduction To Middle School English Teaching In Culture Differences

It is a common view that cultural education should be introduced into English teaching and the purpose of English teaching is to foster the students' ability to communicate in English as well as to teach them certain linguistic knowledge. Knowing the pronunciation, grammar rules and vocabulary does not assure that the students have mastered the language and can communicate effectively. The listener may not understand, even misunderstand the speaker during the cross-cultural communication due to the different cultural background.Some teachers hold that at present the English teaching and learning only focus on linguistic knowledge, such as the accuracy of the pronunciation, the enlargement of vocabulary, the usages of grammar rules and sentence patterns and they may even say that there's no sense to carry on cultural education because the teaching materials are that easy and limited. Some students also pay little attention to cultural knowledge, which leads to an ineffective language learning and, as a result, they may offend the foreigners because of lack of cultural knowledge. Language is part of culture, culture is recorded in language and one can never learn a language well if he does not have a deep understanding of its culture. For the Chinese students who are trying to learn English, it is necessary to get enough background knowledge of the West, especially that of Britain and the United States. The teachers should, undoubtedly, provide their students with as much cultural background knowledge as possible and to help them get motivated to learn the foreign language.Based on Cognition, the following chapters are intended, by analyzing the differences between Chinese and English, to make an exposition of the close link between cultural education and English teaching and of how to permeate cultures on basis of language teaching effectively.