An Empirical Research On The Effects Of Cultural Introduction On English Majors’ Reading Competence In Secondary Vocational School

English reading competence is the foundation of other language abilities. Reading competence not only determines the ability of acquiring knowledge and information, but, to some extent, also reflects the students’ comprehensive capability of using English. In recent years, how to improve Secondary Vocational English majors’ reading competence, motivate their learning interests and increase their language knowledge and cultural awareness have become the urgent tasks of secondary vocational English education. What’s more, English Teaching Syllabus at Secondary Vocational Schools, which was designated by Ministry of Education in China in 2009, explicitly states “ to cultivate the learners’ cultural awareness ” as one of the teaching tasks and “ to guide learners to understand the differences between Chinese and western culture ” as one of the teaching objectives. However, because of the effects of exam-oriented education, in actual teaching practice, many teachers still regard reading teaching as grammar teaching, and mostly use the traditional teaching method, ignoring the function of cultural teaching. As a result, students’ reading competence is very low, and the awareness of cross cultural communication is also very poor.Thus, based on Constructivism Learning Theory and Cross-cultural Communication Theory, this study attempts to implement cultural introduction teaching in secondary vocational school English teaching, aiming to testify the necessity, feasibility and significance of cultural introduction teaching in English reading. This study takes Business English Majors of Grade 2013 in Liaoning Foreign Trade School for Example, and chooses 85 students of two classes which taught by the author herself randomly as subjects. The class with 42 students was chosen as Control Class, and the other one with 43 was Experimental Class. The experiment lasted for 16 weeks from September to December in 2014. The experiment was divided into four steps. Firstly, the author conducted two kinds of questionnaires, one is for 24 teachers who come from three of Dalian vocational schools, and the other is for 85 students, aiming to grasp the current situation of cultural teaching and their attitudes toward it. Besides, a pre-test was conducted to guarantee the validity and reliability of the results. What’s more, in the process of the experiment, the Control Class was taught by the traditional teaching method without cultural introduction, while the Experimental Class was taught with the cultural introduction teaching. Finally, at the end of the experiment, a post-test was carried out.According to the data analysis, the author found that the comprehensive ability, especially reading competence in Experimental Class is obviously better than that of Control Class. Therefore, the conclusion can be made that applying the cultural introduction to the English reading teaching can improve students’ reading competence more effectively and scientifically, at the same time, can also stimulate their English learning interests and enhance their awareness of cross-cultural. However, due to the shortage of theoretical knowledge and the lack of practical teaching experience, this research still exists lots of limitations. Therefore, it needs future study in the following teaching practice.