An Investigation Of Culture Instruction In Senior High School English Teaching And Learning

With the development of the globalization, the communication between different countries and areas become more and more frequent. As a universal language, English has been widely used in the international communication. The trend makes more and more people realize the importance of culture instruction in foreign language teaching.In order to realize the aim of foreign language teaching, culture instruction must be integrated with language teaching to teach students language knowledge and cultivate their culture awareness. Thus, their cross-cultural communicative competence can be developed.In recent years, many experts have done systematic research on culture teaching. But the study on culture instruction in senior high school English is very little. The investigation aims to enrich the related research on culture instruction in senior high school English and improve the present situation of its implementation. To begin with, it offers teachers and students a new viewpoint to understand the importance of culture instruction and helps them build correct attitudes towards culture instruction. Secondly, the investigation also provides some valuable suggestions for teachers to carry out culture instruction in their English teaching, which will be beneficial to improve the quality and efficiency of culture instruction.The thesis tries to explore the present situation of culture instruction in senior high school and figure out the existing problems by investigating 100 students and 20 teachers in Jingmen No.l Middle School. And the investigation aims to answer the following questions:What are teachers’and students’attitudes towards culture instruction? What are teachers’ roles in culture instruction? What are the obstacles in culture instruction? What teaching and learning methods are used in culture instruction? What is the teaching content of culture instruction?In order to answer these questions mentioned above, questionnaires are distributed to the students and teachers. And some of the teacher informants are also interviewed to have a deep understanding of the present situation of culture instruction in senior English. Besides, class observation is conducted to make the results of the investigation more persuasive. By analyzing the results of the questionnaires, the interview and the observation, the author gets the following findings. First of all, most teachers and students have interest in culture knowledge and realize its importance in language learning. Secondly, culture instruction is not well carried out in senior English. Thirdly, according to the students and teachers, the main obstacle in learning culture is that culture knowledge is not tested in the college entrance examination except for the lack of time and energy. Fourthly, there are various ways to learn culture knowledge, but students prefer learning in class under the guidance of teachers. Fifthly, teachers tend to teach culture knowledge individually and concentrate on the culture of English-speaking countries in their teaching, ignoring the input of Chinese culture.