Cultivation Of Students’ Culture Awareness In Senior High School

Currently, English teaching in senior high schools mainly emphasize the mastering of vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure, leaving culture teaching out of consideration. Culture is the foundation of language, and language comes from culture. It is impossible to study English well without knowing culture knowledge.In2003, Ministry of Education issued the New Curriculum Standards, which clearly includes the cultivation of students’culture awareness into teaching objectives. Culture awareness includes:culture knowledge, culture understanding, cross-cultural communicative awareness and cross-cultural communicative competence. Therefore, in English teaching, teachers should not only pay attention to the accumulation of the language knowledge but also the cultivation of students’cross-cultural competence. In this way, students’all around abilities can be fully developed.The thesis aims to investigate the situation of current culture teaching in English class and students’cross-culture knowledge reserves. The author does research by testing students’culture knowledge, making questionnaires for both students and teachers, as well as making interviews with teachers. According to the results of investigation, the author draws the following conclusions:at present, teachers have realized the importance and necessity of culture teaching and students also have interests in culture knowledge; however, on account of the pressure of college entrance examination, culture teaching only becomes the ornament to English class in senior high school, so it is not carried in the real sense. Based on the results of investigation, this paper puts forward some feasible suggestions about how to improve culture teaching in senior high school English class.