A Study Of The Chinese Culture Introduction To English Language Teaching In Senior High School From The Intercultural Perspective

With growing globalization, English culture teaching is getting increasingly connected with the intercultural communication competence. Development of English localization leads English teachers to pay more attention to the influence of the indigenous cultures on English learning and intercultural communication. With the advent of a rising China on the international arena, the world begins to keep a close eye on the Chinese culture. It is necessary for students to describe the Chinese culture in English and improve the sensibility to cultural differences. However, domestic English teaching always ignores the Chinese culture learning and the phenomenon is extremely severe in senior high schools.In the thesis, the author reviewed the studies of culture teachings and the practices of introducing the Chinese culture to English teaching in the West and China. By using comparative method, the author hopes to find a suitable way to introduce the Chinese culture and to improve students'ability to describe the Chinese culture in English, students'sensibility to cultural differences in senior high schools. 60 grade three students are surveyed and the author draws the following conclusions. Firstly, most of students neglect the Chinese culture learning in English classes. Secondly, a quarter of students are interested in describing the Chinese culture in English. Thirdly, students tend to learn describing the Chinese culture in classes and enlarge the vocabulary about the Chinese culture. Accordingly, the author puts forward five principles (relative property, applicability, appropriateness, objectivity and hierarchy) in order to introduce the Chinese culture to English teaching. The author makes full use of Chinese cultural ingredients from textbooks to design English lessons. By comparing the Chinese and western cultures, the author uses four methods which are culture capsules to show the differences of different cultures, explanation for differences between the Chinese and western cultures, comparative lessons, imitation writing in class. And the author adopts three activities which are studying culture-loaded vocabulary, seeing original films, holding salons to celebrate Chinese and western festivals after class. Two classes, one as the test class and the other as the control class, are chosen to conduct the test. Two kinds of research instruments are used in the study: a pre-test and a post-test. According to the statistical data, the author concludes that the competence of describing Chinese culture in English has been improved after the author introducing the Chinese culture to English teaching. Simultaneously, the sensibility to cultural differences has been improved too. Although students'grammar ability does not change, discourse competence in choosing resources and projecting articles has been improved. In sum, introduction of the Chinese culture, as a special method, helps students to describe the Chinese culture in English and actually improved English skills for future intercultural communication.