Investigation Of Cross-cultural Awareness In English Teaching Of Senior Middle Schools Under The New Curriculum

Language researchers generally regard that culture-bound teaching should be related with language teaching closely. As a result of the influence of the exam-oriented system, culture-bound teaching has long been ignored in English education in China. A majority of English teachers put their emphasis on vocabulary, sentence structures or grammar, but neglect the cultural knowledge. With the emergency of the Curriculum Standards for senior middle school students, cultural awareness has been treated as one of the five major goals. It’s not only been emphasized but also includes a guidance of culture-bound teaching in English classes On the basis of the new standard in teaching English, the author makes a survey on culture-bound teaching of English teachers and culture learning of senior middle school students in Zhidan County Senior Middle School. The author also provides some pedagogical suggestions on how to blend cultural awareness in English learning and teaching so as to improve students’ intercultural communicative competence.This thesis mainly consists of five chapters. Chapter one introduces the background, significance and objectives of the research and the lay-out of the thesis. Chapter two mainly illustrates the definition of language and culture and relationship between language and language teaching. Chapter three is the description of the research methods including questionnaires for senior middle school students and interviews for English teachers in Zhidan County Senior Middle School. The data obtained from the survey will be analyzed in details in this chapter. Chapter four describes the implementation of cross-cultural teaching under New Curriculum, aiming at establishing the new model of culture-bound teaching in the classes of English learning in China. Chapter five is the conclusion of the thesis.