A Study Of The Cultivation Of Culture Consciousness In English Reading Teaching In Middle School

Language is the major form of culture and is the carrier and essence of culture. It hasrich cultural connotation and is an integral part of national culture. Culture restricts the formof language, enriches the connotation of language and is the basic content of language. Solanguage is closely related to culture. English Curriculum Standard (2003) lists the fivecurriculum objectives—language knowledge, language skill, learning strategy, emotionattitude and culture consciousness. For the first time, the culture consciousness appears in theEnglish Curriculum Standard. In English teaching, culture refers to the history and geography,local conditions and customs, traditional custom, life style, literature and art, code of conductand values of English-speaking countries. English is one of the official languages widely usedaround the world and an essential tool for people to communicate with foreigners. So it isimportant to learn cultural knowledge. The instructing of cultural knowledge can cultivate thestudents’ culture consciousness and develop their habit of thinking in English. EnglishCurriculum Standard demands the cultivation of the students’ culture consciousness andcross-cultural communication competence, so the cultural knowledge is the indispensablecontent in English teaching.Reading is a cognitive activity, a quick and convenient way of acquiring knowledge andcoming to know the outside world. Reading teaching is the crucial part of English teachingand plays an important role in obtaining information including the cultural knowledge andimproving language competence. The kinds of activities in reading teaching can make thestudent learn cultural knowledge, experience the characters of different cultures and stimulatetheir learning interest. However, most middle school English teachers spend a lot of timeexplaining grammar in the class. They explain the text by translating it word by word and sentence by sentence. Some teachers neglect cultural knowledge teaching and they can notinstruct the cultural knowledge efficiently based on the survey. This is the reason that theauthor investigates the teachers’ situation of cultural knowledge teaching and puts forwardsome ideas to promote cultural knowledge teaching and improve the students’ cross-culturalcommunication competence, which is the practical significance of this thesis. Teachers guidethe students to have a kind of objective and comprehensive attitude towards foreign culture bycomparing the similarities and differences of the two cultures so that the students stick to theirexcellent cultural tradition avoiding their narrow-minded nationalism attitude and followingand imitating foreign culture blindly. In this way, the students can communicate with othersappropriately and decently during the cross-cultural communication.This paper has the following objectives: What are the students and teachers’understanding and attitude to culture consciousness? How do the teachers improve students’interest in learning cultural knowledge? How do the teachers cultivate students’ cultureconsciousness by effective teaching?This paper is divided into six parts:The first part analyses the research background and the importance of culturalconsciousness in English reading teaching. Teachers make the students learn the culturalknowledge, form culture consciousness, and improve their cross-cultural communicationcompetence by the way of reading teaching. The second part introduces the researches aboutreading teaching and cross-cultural consciousness at home and abroad and analyses thecurrent research situation and limitation. Then, this part illustrates the definition of culture andrelated terms, and the goals and contents of cultural teaching. The third part illustrates reading,reading models, reading strategies and schema theory. Teachers instruct the students to buildup schema and accumulate cultural knowledge to form culture consciousness.The fourth part is the survey of culture consciousness in English reading teaching. The researcher adopts questionnaire method to get to know the students’ views on cultureconsciousness and their ways and approaches of learning. This research also uses interviewmethod to find out teachers’ attitudes about culture consciousness and their ways to promotethe students’ learning of cultural knowledge in reading class. The result and analysis of thesurvey indicate most students think that the cultural knowledge is important and helpful toEnglish learning, and the reading class is the main approach to learn cultural knowledge;teachers also hold that cultural knowledge is useful to learning, but they can not find effectiveways to teach cultural knowledge in reading teaching.The fifth part points out the current situation of reading teaching. Then, aiming at theproblems appeared in the survey, the researcher puts forward some suggestions to cultivatethe students’ culture consciousness in reading teaching. The sixth part summaries the majorfindings of the paper, points out the limitations, and offers some suggestions for furtherresearches.All in all, this paper investigates the students and teachers’ attitudes to cultureconsciousness and the situation of culture teaching. Then, the author puts forward someopinions on how to cultivate the students’ culture consciousness in reading teaching whichprovide the reference for further teaching researches.