Applying The Principle Of Autonomous Learning To English Culture Instruction In Shs

The New English Curriculum Criteria calls for incorporating culture teaching in language teaching and cultivating students'intercultural competence. It also points out that in the teaching process, teachers must carefully deal with the relation between delivering knowledge and bringing up ability, and focus on promoting students' independence and self-motivation. The traditional teacher-centered method is not suitable for target culture teaching and learning any more. Instead, the development of the society and education has made autonomous learning a general trend for the contemporary high school students. At the same time, their cognitive characteristics and their enhanced beginning level as high school students have provided possibilities for autonomous learning. The "theory of constructivism and humanism" also gives this research a sound theoretical support.Based on the above, this thesis undertakes to analyze the relationship between language, culture and communication, to introduce an advanced and effective learning strategy in English culture teaching-autonomous learning that is, to design a new teaching model, the ACL Teaching Model. According to this model, teachers should make every effort to develop senior high school students' culture learning autonomy; that is, they do not spend much time teaching students culture knowledge, but teach students rather some culture learning strategies, and when and how to use the culture learning strategies correctly; they should also train students to consciously monitor their own culture learning, organizing various kinds of activities to stimulate their learning enthusiasm and encourage them to learn culture autonomously step by step. In a word, teachers must try to get students to form a good habit of learning culture autonomously in and out of class.An experiment is carried out to prove the effects of this model of autonomous culture learning (ACL). It is verified that the strategy of autonomous learning can greatly help students to master the target culture and rapidly develop the students' intercultural communicative competence. A learner-based teaching approach such as this is more effective than the traditional ones.