The Exploration Of Culture In Teaching Material And The Cultural Penetration In Teaching Under The New National Curriculum Standard

English teaching in senior high school in the past decades has been oriented to the National College Entrance Examination, and focused on language form and structures. Therefore more stress is placed on phonetics, vocabulary and grammar teaching, with little emphasis on cultural knowledge behind the target language and the cultivation of culture awareness; or culture teaching is just concerned with superficial culture knowledge such as table manners. As a result,not knowing the differences between Chinese and western cultures, students usually make a great number of pragmatic errors in communication. This indicates the English teaching deviates from the true language teaching and causes students fail in acquiring the authentic language. Moreover, just because the students don't master the authentic language, they can't be well prepared for the English examination. English teaching should be all-round and multidimensional and the one-sided development is bound to cause the failure of the language acquisition.With many years' English teaching experience, the writer has been reflecting on how to make a breakthrough in English teaching to develop intercultural communicative competence and meanwhile to improve the students' performance in the National College Entrance Examination.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One deals with research objective and methods. The study is based on the writer's research of the current development of related theories and the pressing demands of practical English teaching. In Chapter Two, the writer points out the reason for the absence of culture penetration in English teaching after several years' investigation and study of the current teaching practice in senior high schools. Chapter Three copes with cross-cultural communicative teaching approach, schema theory, and the significance of guiding English teaching practice.Chapter Four focuses on the feasibility of strengthening the culture-penetration English teaching, including the cultural contents to be employed in English teaching, the characteristics of psychological development of senior high school students and the requirement of New Curriculum Standard in English teaching. The last chapter inquires into the principle, strategies and methods to develop cultural items in the present textbooks and their penetration in English teaching.