| As globalization develops further and further, the international communicationbecomes more and more frequent. English as one of the most commonly used languages isgetting more and more important in international communication. We all know thatlanguage and culture are inseparable, language is the carrier of culture and culture is thebasis of language.“The New English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools”(2003) clearly illustrates that the objectives of cultural awareness is one of generalcurriculum objectives for senior students. And the cultural awareness objectives includecultural knowledge, culture understanding, and the awareness of interculturalcommunication, the competence of intercultural communication. In the curriculumstandards，various goals’ description have been made based on different grades.From the specific description of each grade in the standards we can see that it is verynecessary for senior high school teachers to carry out culture instruction in English class,for cultural instruction could help to foster the students’ awareness of interculturalcommunication and their ability of cross-cultural communication, and all of these couldcontribute to developing the students’ comprehensive competence of language. In recentyears, as the concept of “culture instruction” is gradually infiltrating various kinds ofteaching materials, culture instruction has become an integral part of English teaching. It isan important process to cultivate people’s comprehensive quality of language during thehigh school English teaching, and in this period the English teaching aims to train thestudents to become international and keen to foreign culture. In high school Englishteaching, it is a great way to improve the teachers’ teaching efficiency and the students’competence of comprehensive language using by cultivating the students’ awareness andability of cross-culture communication.This thesis intends to investigate the current situation of culture instruction in seniorhigh schools which includes the attitude of the teachers and students to culture instruction,the implementation of culture teaching and the teachers and students’ expectation for culture instruction. Based on this investigation the author hopes to get something usefulfor senior high English teaching. Three ways are used in this research, they are: culturalknowledge test, questionnaires for students and interview for teachers in Liao Cheng No.2Middle School. All the teachers and students are randomly selected to participate in thisresearch. By the authentic data collected from the research, the author gets the majorproblems of culture teaching and learning in senior high school. The results of theinvestigation shows that: First, the significance of culture knowledge in language learning,the close relationship between language and culture and the importance to improve thecapability of expressing Chinese culture in English for the Chinese learners have beenrealized by most students; Second, for most students, the goals of cultural consciousnessin The New English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools are not that familiar tothem; Third, most senior English teachers do not pay that much attention to cultureinstruction and the teachers’ ways of culture instruction are simple and monotonous;Fourth, most students don’t have much interest in culture learning; Fifth, students’cross-cultural communicative competence is rather poor and the ability to express Chineseculture thing in English is also needed to be improved.The research shows that cultural teaching in English class has not been implementedeffectively and comprehensively for senior high school students due to the heavy burden ofCollege Entrance Examination．As the results of insufficient culture instruction，students’have got weaker cultural awareness and poor cross-cultural communicative competence.Based on the findings, the author presents some suggestions to enhance culture teachingand learning in senior high schools accordingly. |
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