A Survey Of The Current Situation Of Culture Teaching In Junior High School EFL Classroom

With the economic globalization, quick development of modern technology and society, and more and more interchanges between different countries, the world becomes a"global village". And with the success of the Beijing Olympic Games and Shanghai World EXPO, communication between China and the outside world is increasingly frequent. People have realized the importance and necessity of intercultural communication learning. However, to cultivate intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence, it's far from sufficient to just learn linguistic knowledge. Even if the students have gained a good mastery of vocabulary and grammatical knowledge, they can't avoid misunderstanding and sometimes even fail in intercultural communication. To cultivate learners'intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence, we must attach importance to culture teaching.There are two research questions: how culture teaching is carried out in junior high school EFL classroom? What problems exist in culture teaching in junior high school EFL classroom at present?Based on some theoretical foundation about language and culture, and the objectives and content of culture teaching, this thesis first argues that culture teaching and cultivation of intercultural awareness is the key to the development of intercultural communicative competence. To probe into the problems existing in current culture teaching in junior high schools, the author did an empirical study through observing the classroom teaching and investigating among teachers and students with questionnaires. After almost three months'classroom observation, it is found that culture teaching in junior high schools is on the way. When there is cultural knowledge on the textbook, teachers will spend some time teaching it during the process of teaching the text through combining culture teaching with the teaching of vocabulary and reading. But the problems mainly lie in the following aspects: the content of culture teaching is limited and strongly confined to the textbook; insufficient teaching facilities exert bad influence on culture teaching; cultural knowledge is treated differently in demonstration lessons and normal lessons; the heavy academic burden and busy school schedule seriously block the culture learning and teaching.Finally, the author proposes some suggestions on culture teaching and learning based on the refection on the current situation of culture teaching.