Research On Native Culture's Fatigue Phenomenon In Senior High School English Textbooks

This thesis is an attempt to clarify certain issues that seem to me to emerge from adopting a communicative approach to the teaching of English as a foreign language (TEFL). I, in particular, focus on TEFL in Senior High Schools.As an integral part of Chinese education, TEFL is intended to cultivate EFL learners'integrated language use ability. According to Criteria of Senior High School English Curriculum (Curriculum Criteria, 2003), senior high school EFL learners are required to have good command of linguistic knowledge, meanwhile acquire profound knowledge of culture in relation to native culture and target culture. As a matter of fact, however, people have been attaching great importance to target culture, native culture has not been given adequate emphasis on. As a result, many of senior high school EFL learners have difficulty expressing the contents about his or her own culture in English appropriately, thus influencing their successful communication. Pro. Cong insightfully names this phenomenon by"Native Culture's Aphasia". Inspired by this, I describe it as native culture's fatigue phenomenon.Considering textbooks are the most significant medium of language and culture input in EFL classroom teaching in senior high schools and exert considerable influence over what learners learn and how they do it as well as what instructors teach and how they do it. Therefore, an effective way to explore the native culture's fatigue phenomenon is to survey the authorized textbooks, of which I choose Senior English for China published by People's Education Press (SECPEP).Taking Hymes'theory of communicative competence as the major theoretical foundation in combination with Curriculum Criteria (2003) and basing on native culture studies abroad and at home, this thesis is to sort out the two problems: 1) Is there a native culture's fatigue phenomenon in SECPEP? 2) What negative consequences does native culture's fatigue bring to EFL learning? The methodology adopted to handle the two issues is the combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. Firstly, an investigation into native culture's distribution in SECPEP was made. Secondly, a questionnaire was designed to examine present conditions of senior high school EFL learners'abilities to transmit native culture in English, for which the study got 120 participant samples through non-random sampling at three senior high schools. In addition, an examination was conducted to check the differences of communicative competence between control group confined to SECPEP and experimental group exposed to more native culture. All the data were clicked into computer and processed by Statistic Package of Social Science (SPSS) 13.0 for Windows. Descriptive statistics, deductive statistics and independent-samples t-test analysis were made during the study. Following the series of work, the results were obtained that native culture contents were obviously less than others in SECPEP, that the majority of senior high school EFL learners have no/a little knowledge of how to transmit native culture contents in English, and that the means of the control group were inferior to those of the experimental group.The results showed:A) Senior high school EFL learners'awareness of native culture was weak;B) Senior high school EFL learners were difficult to express in English the contents about native culture appropriately;C) The input of native culture in SECPEP was inadequate;D) The inadequacy of native culture had a negative impact on EFL learners'communicative competence—further confirming the phenomenon that native culture contents in SECPEP were fatigue.