The Integration Of Culture Teaching Into English Teaching In Senior High School Under The New Curriculum Standards

Owing to the influence of the exam-oriented education and structural linguistics, culture teaching is neglected in English education of China for a long time. English teachers used to pay more attention to structure knowledge, pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar, but ignore cultural elements. Actually in many cases communicative failures are caused by a lack of intercultural understanding, rather than the absence of linguistic competence. However, in recent years with the development of pedagogical theory and the increase of intercultural communication activity, Chinese English educators become aware that the ultimate goal of English teaching is to cultivate the intercultural communicative competence of students, and the only way to realize it is integrating culture teaching with English teaching. Moreover theCurriculum Standards for Senior High English 2003 (the Standards 2003 or the New Standards) adds cultivation of cultural awareness as one of the five major goals and lists specific objectives, which not only emphasizes the significance of culture teaching, but also gives a direction to the culture teaching practice. On the basis of the New Standards, the author of the thesis undertakes an exploration of the specific contents and existing problems of culture teaching in senior high schools, and provides some pedagogical suggestions on how to integrating culture teaching into English teaching, promoting cultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence of students.The thesis consists of five chapters as follows:Chapter one introduces the background and significance of the study and the outline of the thesis.Chapter two reviews some theories relevant to culture teaching and presents the requirements of cultivation of cultural awareness in the New Standards. Chapter three describes the specific cultural contents of culture teaching in senior high schools.Chapter four researches the status quo of culture teaching in high schools, and analyzes the results.Chapter Five offers some pedagogical suggestions on promoting culture teaching based on the analysis of the research results.