Incorporation Of The Teaching Of Culture Into High School English Class

The thesis is concerned with the contribution and incorporation of the teaching of culture into the foreign language classroom. Teaching a foreign language is not just on syntactic structures or learning new vocabulary and expressions, but should incorporate some cultural elements, which are intertwined with language itself. The purpose of this thesis is to show the essence, importance, goals and principles of culture teaching in high school English classes and also to provide some techniques and suggestions in culture teaching.The newly-revised English Syllabus for Senior Middle School Students gives a comparatively clear interpretation on the communicative principles and the relationship between language and culture in English teaching. However, in SEFC teaching practice, little attention has been paid to the cultural connotation of the language; Most of the teachers still put their attention mainly on the development of students'linguistic competence, such as pronunciation and structure. The typical teaching model is: read and explain new words, analyze text and deal with exercises. The consequence of such teaching method is that students soon feel tired of English, which greatly hinders their English proficiency. Teachers and students should be aware of the importance of culture and realize second language learning is virtually second culture learning,and to teach a language is to teach another culture. Thus English teachers should make great efforts to cultivate students'cultural awareness.In view of the current situation in SEFC teaching practice, the writer of this paper is about to explore the principles and methods of the culture-loaded teaching; in the hope of finding a way to cultivate students'cultural awareness and communicative competence along with students'linguistic competence, the writer has also carried out some experiments through her own teaching practice to see to it that these methods are applicable and efficient. Just like many experiments and researches show that systematic and effective culture teaching strategies could lead to significant improvement in learners'pragmatic competence, communicative competence and cultural awareness.