An Investigation Of Current Situations Of Culture Teaching In Senior High Schools Under New Curricula Reform

With the globalization of the world economy,the popularization of international exchange, and especially the success of the 2008 Olympic Games held in Beijing,there is more and more cross-cultural communication between China and other countries.China is in desperate need of people who are well-informed of foreign cultures and capable of communicating accurately and appropriately in intercultural situations.Cross-cultural communication competence has become a must for people of the 21^st century.However,for a long time,in our secondary English class, linguistic knowledge and competence have always been overemphasized while culture related to English-speaking countries is neglected.Linguistic knowledge alone,however,cannot be equivalent to cross-cultural communication competence.Even if students have gained a good mastery of vocabulary and grammar rules,they can't avoid misunderstanding or even failing in cross-cultural communication.Therefore,it should no longer be neglected to develop in our students an intercultural competence based on learning about the target culture.Fortunately,the State Education Commission has issued new Senior High School English Curriculum Standards(2003),(hereafter the Curriculum Standards or New Curriculum Standards),in which developing the students' cross-cultural communicative awareness and competence is specially stressed.But we are wondering whether this guarantees that culture teaching is being underway in the senior middle schools.How in fact is it getting on? What problems exist in culture teaching at present? How will it be carried out in the future? This thesis tries to explore all these problems.Based on some theoretical background about language and culture,this paper first brings up some preliminary statements on the history and the goals of culture teaching and hence puts forward that culture teaching and learning should be set as an important object in the senior high school classroom teaching.The thesis,through questionnaires and investigating teachers by telephones about how language and culture is taught nowadays and how students learn culture in classroom comes up with a comprehensive understanding of the present problems with the culture aspect in their teaching.The result shows that culture knowledge is deeply loved by students as well as teachers.And the problem mainly lies in the following three aspects:lack of a crossculture-oriented curriculum;teachers' low intercultural quality;and lack of intercultural-oriented course books.In the end,the thesis contributes some reflections upon culture teaching at present in senior high schools and points out that language teaching is actually culture teaching and argues for some methods to solve the problems so as to enhance students' cross-cultural competence in senior high schools.