A Case Study On The Current Situation Of Culture Teaching In General Senior High School

Nowadays, the exchange and communication between other countries and China are more frequent than ever before, and English, the most widely used language, plays an increasingly important role in the international communication. It is true that learning and teaching English have been emphasized for a long time in China, but the target culture knowledge and intercultural communication competence were to a great extent ignored.In order to improve this situation, Ministry of Education issued the new English curriculum standard (NECS) in2003, which put forward detailed objectives of culture teaching in senior high schools. Up to now, the curriculum has been carried out for almost9years, and some issues, for example, whether the culture teaching situation is improved or not and what the attitudes of teachers and students are, draw scholars and education experts’ attention. Thus, they did some researches and studies, which, instead of concentrating on the situation of English culture teaching in general senior high schools in specific areas, mainly focus on theories and overall status around the country. Therefore, to gain the firsthand information of general senior high schools in Tianjin, the author chose students from Tianjin Yu Hong senior high school as subjects of the case study and conducted an investigation with cultural tests, questionnaires and interviews for English teachers and students.After reading numerous references and consulting the papers of previous researchers, the author designs a cultural test and a questionnaire for students and an interview for teachers in Tianjin Yu Hong senor high, conducts investigations in the classroom, collects and analyzes data, and then summaries the results. Most students do not have much culture knowledge, and even fail to identify some common sense and world famous buildings in Britain and America. In addition, their intercultural communication competence and the ability of translating some English and Chinese idioms are not as good as expected. As for teachers, most of them realize the importance of culture teaching and conduct some related activities in daily teaching, but they also admit that their culture knowledge are not enough and updated for teaching culture and they have problems when choosing the effective teaching methods. Based on the results illustrated above, the author tries to propose some specific approaches of teaching both target and native culture and describe the factors that have a fundamental impact on culture teaching.Owing to lack of time and experiences, there are some limitations in this thesis, such as the number of subjects is narrow. Therefore, the author will focus on the limitations and conduct further research on culture teaching in the future.