Exploring English Culture Teaching In Senior High School From Metaphorical Perspective

Since1978, the implementation of the reform and opening-up policy in China aswell as in the international context of the modern world of economic globalization,exchanges and cooperation between countries gradually broadened and deepened,which prompted the country to set off the climax of learning English, and English hasalso become the main subject of three core courses at the basic education stage.However, many students in the school have learnt English for many years, theirlanguage skills and interpersonal skills are disjointed. Since long time ago, teachershad always focused on students’ language ability and language skills, but ignored thestudents pragmatic competence, especially communicative competence, which resultin cross-cultural communication becoming weaknesses in teaching and lead to China’sstudents’ poor cross-cultural awareness and poor cross-cultural communicative ability.In April2003, a new High School English Curriculum Standards (experimentalversion) was promulgated by China’s Ministry of Education and published by People’sEducation Press. Cultural awareness is the first time explicitly listed as one of thegoals of the high school English curriculum; in addition,“cultural knowledge, culturalunderstanding, cross-cultural awareness and communicative skills" were listed as thegoals of language learning. In2011, China’s Ministry of Education promulgated aCompulsory Education English Curriculum Standards (2011version) which furtherclarified cultural awareness. Although, the government and teachers began to focus onEnglish culture teaching in senior high school, but there are still a lot of questionsabout the way of cross-cultural teaching. In recent years, the achievements ofmetaphor are quite significant. Some scholars begin to combine metaphor withEnglish teaching, because metaphor has cultural characteristics, and it is acombination of language and culture, scholars emphasized the importance ofmetaphor study on English culture teaching in senior high school.The first chapter of this thesis introduces background information of domesticEnglish learning and high school English culture teaching. Subsequently, it also interprets the research purpose, significance, research methods and structure of thepaper. The second chapter is the literature review section, this part mainly describesdevelopment and trends on the research of metaphor at home and abroad, thedevelopment and trends on culture teaching at home and abroad, and the developmentand trends on the combination of domestic metaphor and foreign language teachingresearch. The third chapter is the theoretical basis of combining metaphor and cultureteaching which mainly introduces the nature and characteristics of metaphor, thecultural level of metaphor, relations between metaphor and culture. The fourth chapteris the latest dynamics of culture teaching in high school English classroom andinvestigation on the understanding level and use of metaphor. The fifth chapter ismainly for the analysis of the survey results, the paper recognizes the necessity andurgency of learning metaphors, it sums up the problems in culture teaching whichshould be paid attention to, it also proposes the methods about how culture teachingcan make use of metaphor.This paper will be written by the new curriculum and the research results ofmetaphor, which uses a combination of qualitative research and quantitative research,and it also makes use of a combination of a variety of methods, such as theoreticalanalysis, quotation, questionnaire survey and interviews. The author mainly usesquestionnaires and interviews, the questionnaire survey aims at finding out status quoof English culture teaching in high school. Based on the finding, the interview aims atknowing teachers’ and students’ level of metaphor understanding and use. Accordingto the existing problems in the survey and interview, the author draws conclusion thatteachers’ and students’ metaphor consciousness is weak in culture teaching practice,and they also lack specialized training and specialized teaching materials. Aiming atproviding some guidance for culture teaching in senior high school, the author putsforward suggestions that teachers should pay attention to cultural differences inmetaphor and training of students’ metaphorical thinking, which lay a solid foundationfor the culture teaching level step by step.