A Study Of The Effects Of Different Cultural Teaching Techniques On High School Students’ Culture Learning

Along with the formation of globalization and our country joining the World TradeOrganization, increasingly exchanges with foreigners and intercultural communication havebecome more and more frequent, so that cross-cultural communication has been increasing.More and more people have found that pure linguistic form English teaching was difficult tomeet the needs of society. Though many scholars have realized the importance of cultureteaching and learning, most of these research objects are university foreign language learners,the real study of culture teaching in high schools are quite rare. Thus, how to carry out highschool English culture teaching effectively in order to improve students’ cultural proficiencyand cultural awareness become the main content of English teaching in senior high schools.The English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School2003has listed Englishculture as one of the English learning goals and also clearly prescribed for each grade ofsenior English. The concept of cultural awareness is being accepted and conducted in seniorEFL classrooms by most of the English teachers. As we all know that language and culturecan not be separated, culture teaching must be integrated with English language teaching. Theimportance of culture teaching in English education was recognized by the Chinese scholarsand foreign language educators in the early1980s. Since then, culture in foreign languageteaching has always been a hot topic. Although many high school English teachers andlearners have known the essential importance of culture teaching, for more than two decades,researches on culture education have made gratifying achievements in theories, the currentculture teaching still exist many problems, especially in middle school English classroom.According to the relationship between language and culture, this thesis expounds theimportance and necessity of high school English culture teaching from different angles.Meanwhile, combining the reality of curriculum reform, the author explores how to use theculture teaching techniques properly to guide the middle school English culture teaching. Thisresearch selected a senior high school of Shuozhou, from which the author picked out two parallel experimental classes for a term of culture teaching. First, using questionnaires forboth high school teachers and students to investigate the actual situation of English cultureteaching and learning, then gave a pretest on two classes to know their degree ofunderstanding the target culture. Next, the author used culture asides in the experimental classand culture interspersion in the control class respectively as the culture teaching techniques tohelp the classes absorb cultural information and develop cultural awareness, and finally aposttest and a post-questionnaire on two classes were conducted respectively.Survey results show that the cultural learning in high school English teaching is stillvery scarce, and students’ mastery of the target language culture knowledge is limited and in alow degree. The pretest shows that there is no significant difference between two classes. Theposttest and post-questionnaire show that both of the culture aside and culture interspersionteaching techniques play a positive role in students’ culture learning. On the contrary, theformer is more effective than the latter in promoting the learners’ input of cultural informationand facilitating the target culture learning.In addition, this research also has significant implications. In foreign language learningenvironment in China, high school English teachers should use appropriate cultural teachingtechniques according to different levels of learners in order to promote the learners’proficiency of the target culture learning.