Cultural Context And Senior School English Teaching

With the rapid development of the global economy and the frequent exchanges with foreign countries, English teaching has played an important part in basic education in China. For the first time, the National English Curriculum Standards has set cultural awareness and inter-cultural communicative competence as one of the teaching goals of foreign language education, and put it down into the teaching syllabus. It makes cultural teaching much more important in the teaching of English in senior schools. In order to cultivate the students'ability to communicate in English, teachers should teach the students language and culture simultaneously, find out the cultural context from the textbooks and try to integrate it into the teaching. It is a necessary way to improve the students'communicative competence. What's more, senior school English teaching has to face the great pressure coming from the college entrance examination. Looking through the NMET in the past few years, we can easily find that what has been mainly tested is not only grammar and vocabulary, but also cultural knowledge. So it is necessary for the students to strengthen cultural awareness and to grasp more knowledge about cultural context.However, the traditional teaching method is still quite popular in Chinese foreign language classrooms. Teachers always pay much attention to the accuracy of language forms but ignore the appropriate use of the language. As a result, the inappropriate use of foreign language often occurs when students communicate with people from western countries, which frequently result in their embarrassment and even the failure in communication. The reason for this, according to the author, mainly lies in the teachers'ignorance of the application of context theory into their language teaching.Language is closely related with context, for the use of language cannot be detached from it. Context has a great influence on interpreting and restricting the use of language. Therefore, foreign language teaching and learning cannot be detached from context. In order to meet the demand of society and cultivate more students with communicative competence, based on the discussion of context theory, cultural context theory, communicative competence, their relationship with senior school English teaching, and a survey study conducted in senior schools, this thesis attempts to suggest a framework on applying cultural context to English teaching in senior schools so as to improve the quality of foreign language teaching and learning in our country and thus cultivate students'communicative competence.This thesis is composed of five chapters and a brief conclusion.Chapter One is an overview of the history of foreign language teaching and culture in the west and in China.Chapter Two presents an exploration of the concepts and theories related to context, cultural context, communicative competence, and their relationship with foreign language teaching. This chapter not only provides teachers, students and researchers alike with the theory into practice, but also provides a theoretical foundation for the experiment of applying cultural context to foreign language teaching in chapter four.Chapter Three is the survey study of investigating some teachers and students in senior schools about their current situation of teaching and learning English through cultural context in terms of their understanding of cultural context theory, their application of it, the problems in their work under discussion, and their suggestions for a better job, with the purpose of finding out the problems existing in the current foreign language teaching. Despite the importance of cultural context in foreign language teaching, through the survey study, we find that the current application of cultural context theory to foreign language teaching is unsatisfactory.Chapter Four is the focus of the thesis. In this chapter, an experiment of 16 weeks is conducted to test the effectiveness of the model of applying cultural context theory to English teaching in senior schools. The data is processed by using the SPSS, through which means, variances, standard deviations are examined. In order to show the reliability of the experiment, an teaching plan with cultural context in the experimental group is also provided.The major findings, limitations and the pedagogical implications to the English teaching are included in the last chapter. Through the data analysis we can conclude that the students in the experimental group have made much more progress in language learning. So we can say that it is not only productive but also significant to apply cultural context theory to English teaching in senior schools. Though there's no particularly added culture element in the final examination and the experiment occupies part of the students'time for language skill practice, the most possible reason to be mentioned in the following analysis, is that the experiment motivates the students'interest in learning English,and this indicates a positive impact on applying cultural context to senior school English teaching. The current study, however, cannot be expected to solve all the problems in senior school English teaching and has its limitations that should not be avoided in the future research.The last part of this thesis is the conclusion, which takes a retrospect at the whole thesis and a prospect on the study of the application of cultural context theory to foreign language teaching. It is hoped that in the end readers will gain some inspiration from this thesis.