A Study Of The Culture Teaching To Improve Jr. Two Students’ English Competence

Nowadays culture teaching becomes more and more popular. Although the new English Teaching Syllabus for Full Time Junior Middle Schools stresses the importance of culture teaching in EFL in China, there are many misconceptions, leading to the ignorance of cultivation of culture awareness. English educators have been aware of the relation between language and culture, but the traditional approach is still greatly being used, which results in the students’dumb English and poor communicative skills. Finally the students ignore the culture learning and lack culture awareness.Having been teaching Junior (Jr.) English with textbook New Standard English (NSE) for six years, the author finds the textbooks are short of culture reading, which makes the students lack culture knowledge. Therefore, she uses ACTIVE Skills for Reading1to improve students’communicative skills and culture awareness as another textbook in order to make their language competence better. During more than one-term experiment, the author tries to find two answers:1. Do the learners who use two textbooks (NSE and ACTIVE Skills for Reading1)improve their culture competence and communicative ability with the same teaching time?2. Do the learners who use two textbooks improve the language competence (listening, speaking, reading and writing) with the same teaching time?In the study, a total of60Jr. Two students from Tianjin Experimental High School participated in the experiment, control class and experiment class. Data were collected through the following instruments—two questionnaires, pre-test and post-test. By means of the analysis of data, the students’competence in culture and language has been studied together. The author studied much information from books, Internet and so on. Combined with multiple intelligence approach, task-based teaching in the settlement of culture task and her teaching experiences, the author tried to find out effective culture teaching approaches for Jr. students. At the end of the experiment, the hypothesis was reached and also she got the conclusion:enriching culture reading is an effective way to improve Jr. students’culture and language competence.