A Study Of How To Improve English Classroom Teaching In Vocational School Under Cross-cultural Perspective

For the students in the stage of basic education, especially those in the middle vocationalschools, to learn and use English is more often to comprehensively master a language symbolsystem such as tenses, grammar and tens of thousands of words. They have no proper learningmethods, interest and strong learning motivation, which makes this process unbelievably difficultboth for the learners and teachers. In order to carry out English teaching more effectively, somepeople think that we need to excavate cultural connotation underneath the language symbol asmuch as possible on the operational level, because there is a huge cultural difference between thetarget language and the native language, while the differences tend to make learners curious andthen arouse their motivation of learning through the contrast. According to the analysis of manyprofessionals, the traditional learning which does not involve cross-culture learning ignores therelationship between language and society, language and culture, language and style, languageand communication, language and context. It just undergoes the process from one language toanother or is examination-oriented, following a micro and mechanical learning method. Andlanguage is alive, language exists in the society, and language works for communication.Therefore, teachers and learners must establish the macro learning method, a method that isflexible and effective, and we should not only focus on the language, but also broaden ourhorizons, pay attention to other aspects related to language, and build up new learning concepts.This study attempts to carry out English classroom teaching in the cross-cultural perspectiveunder the guidance of the relevant theory. The author selects65students from two classes ofGrade09and a group of four teachers in Qingdao Art School as the research subjects. Themethods involved are classroom observation, questionnaire survey, and interviews with teachers.An analysis of the data from the questionnaires and the interviews finds that the existing teachingmaterial is lacking in cross-cultural content and that introduction of intercultural content into theclassroom can help improve classroom teaching and learning. After conducting qualitative andquantitative analysis, the author tries to reveal how the introduction of intercultural content intovocational school English teaching can influence learners’ language acquisition and the teachers’teaching level, thereby hoping to encourage teachers to bring culture-related content into the classroom so as to improve the quality of teaching and to promote students’ second languagelearning.After the investigation and analysis of the data, the author reveals the following findings:(1)Culture-related content constitutes a small proportion of occupation English teaching textbooks;students are weak in their cultural knowledge;(2) Influenced by the culture of English speakingcountries through the media like movies, songs and websites, quite some students have shown aninterest in foreign culture;(3) A comparison of the teaching effect between experimental classwhere cultural contents are introduced in classroom teaching and the control class where routineteaching methods are used shows that culture teaching is helpful to improve the students’learning interest to a certain extent;(4) Culture teaching should be combined with thecorresponding teaching means, which will have more obvious effects on the improvement ofteaching.Based on the survey results, the author puts forward some suggestions on how to improvethe teaching of English in vocational school classrooms:(1) Teachers should set up the“learner-centered” concept, change their traditional teaching role, be flexible in the choice ofteaching content, and appropriately listen to the opinions and suggestions of the students.(2)Follow the traditional approach of group learning to explore the strengths of cooperation amongstudents.(3) Classroom teaching and extracurricular activities should be well combined tomaximize the enthusiasm of the students.