Oxford High School English Vocabulary Teaching Cultural Import

With the pace of globalization speeding up and ever-increasing intercultural activities, cross-cultural communication has been a necessity. In foreign-language teaching, learners only mastering a language itself and some usage can't gurantee the efficiency of intercultural communication. Actually, cultural obstacles need overcoming. Chinese English learners, especially senior high school students mainly learn English to be admitted to colleges and universities. However, more importantly, efficient intercultural communication to know about foreign culture and spread Chinese good traditional culture should be students'English learning ultimate goal in future.To meet the need to cultivate students'cultural awareness and enhance their cultural competence, Jiangsu Province introduced the new set of textbook for senior high school, Advance with English, which covers varieties of topics concerning society and culture with rich loads of cutural vocabulary. As the most active element of language to reflect a nation's culture, vocabulary is viewed as an important carrier of language. Therefore, it is an effective way to introduce culture knowledge in vocabulay teaching. Then, have English techers improved their own cultural consciousness in vocabulary teaching? Have senior high school students'cultural awareness and knowledge been greatly promoted since the new textbook was adopted?The thesis reviews the previous and recent researches. To know about the present situation of English teaching, the researcher surveyed the English teachers and some sample students from 3 grades with questionaires respectively in a four-star senior high school in Jiangsu Province. As subjects,98 students in this school attended prior and post tests and the experiment in almost a year. After the experiment, the researcher analysed the data and interviewed the subjects to prove the main view, with an example and some practical methods presented.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is a general intoduction to the topic, including the thesis'research background and significance. Meanwhile, some relevant terms are defined, followed by the structure of the thesis. Chapter Two includes the review of some previous and recent researches on vocabulary and culture teaching both at home and abroad. Chapter Three deals with the analysis of the new textbook, Advance with English, collecting and sorting out its cultural vocabulay briefly. Besides, the researcher surveyed some sample students from three grades and most English teachers respectively on the present situation of vocabulay and culture teaching in a four-star school since the new textbook was put into use in 2005 in order to find exsiting problems. Chapter Four deals with the experimental research conducted in the author's two classes,its designs, goals, process, results and detailed analysis included. Chapter Five concludes the research that its goals were fulfilled as expected on the whole, pointing out some unsolved problems and putting forward some suggestions for future research.