Integrating Chinese Culture Into Senior English Instruction

Taking a look back on English teaching in our country, we’ll find students get to absorb more target cultural knowledge than native culture in the language learning process, which eventually leads to their inability to express Chinese culture in English and failure in intercultural communication. Ever since Professor Cong Cong coined the notion of "Cultural Aphasia" in2000, plenty of researches have been done on this topic. Through a brief review, the author finds out that most studies in this field focus on the language teaching process, and choose college students as research subjects. Fairly little research is done on senior high, especially EFL textbooks in senior high.Based on the theoretical foundation of the relationship between language and culture as well as teacher and curricular material variables in culture teaching, the research selected English teachers and the most widely in-use textbook-Advance with English as the subject. Both dynamic study and static analysis are adopted, with the former on teachers and the latter on textbooks.Results show that though equipped with the consciousness of native culture teaching, most teachers fail to carry it out in practice due to exam-oriented concerns; native culture has been incorporated into senior high EFL textbooks, but is still in a disadvantaged position in terms of quantity and location as compared to target culture. According to statistics collected, native culture appear20times in all five modules, and mostly in independent-study sections like Task and Project, while target culture appear26times and mainly in key parts for teaching like Reading. Meanwhile, native culture input and output are imbalanced. The fact that input is much less than output is against the learning process of input, intake and output. All these indicate that native culture, though having been integrated into culture teaching, still needs greater attention. At last, the author puts forward several suggestions for teachers and the compiling of textbook. For teachers, they should:1) improve cultural qualities;2) change attitudes towards native culture learning;3) better balance native culture and target culture;4) explore multiple culture teaching methods. For the textbook, advice is given to the compilers to:1) combine with the conditions of the country;2) optimize the structure of compilers;3) improve their quality;4) introduce multi-culture flexibly while balancing native cultural input and output. The thesis is.written in hope to improve the quality of native culture teaching in senior high and thus improving students’intercultural communicative competence.