Cultural Penetration And Cross-cultural Awareness Cultivation In Secondary School English Teaching

With the economic and social development, the communication between China and the outside world is increasingly frequent. People have more opportunities to contact foreign cultures. Culture teaching is playing an important role in foreign language education. At the same time, the modern theories abroad concerning culture teaching are widely spread in China. As such, how to teach culture in foreign language education in the Chinese cultural environment is a hot topic. However, it is unfortunate up to now that only few papers have disscussed cultural teaching based on secondary school English teaching. This thesis attempted to make some researches in this field.Firstly, the auther has provided a brief review of the history of cultural teaching both at home and abroad . At the sametime, the current situation of culture teaching in China is examined.Secondly came the theoretical consideration. It gives a brief account of the definitions of language, culture, cultural awareness, and people's different opinions on the relationship between language and culture. We take the theoretical account of culture and cultural teaching as the theoretical framework for the author's research.Thirdly, the author of this thesis made a survey of current cultural teaching in some secondary schools in Shandong. A quiz and two questionnaires were used to get data for this research. The two questionnaires were designed for teachers and students respectively. The purpose of the survey is to determine both teachers'and students'attitudes towards culture instruction and find out teachers'current performances in class in secondary school English teaching, as well as learners'acquisition of communicative competence and cultural awareness. The results of the survey showed that culture teaching has not gained its due place in English teaching in secondary schools. It mainly reflects on: 1) The idea of traditional English teaching has taken root in the hearts of the middle school English teachers; they laid stress on students'language competence but neglected their cross-cultural communicative competence, and they are hesitant about their views on how to teach the English culture although they have come to realize that culture is an important aspect of language teaching. 2) There has been a great lack of information in English textbooks on...