A Study On The Introduction Of Culture Into English Reading Class In Junior Middle School

As we all know that English reading occupies a decisive position in English teaching. It is one of the purposes and means of language learning.For many years, the teaching of reading has received great attention in junior middle school English teaching in China. English teachers in the country school try to improve the students’ reading comprehension ability through lots of reading training. Some of them try to develop effective teaching methods.However, driven by the exam-oriented education system in junior middle school, some teachers pay more attention to emphasizing the study of language knowledge and spending a large amount of time teaching vocabulary or practicing the grammar knowledge in the reading class. As a result, we find that most students focus on the penny knowledge they read from the reading material but miss the central idea of the passage and even the author’s feelings and intentions of writing. A lot of researches on reading comprehension of ELT have shown that one of great reasons for misunderstanding the reading passage is due to the lack of English cultural background knowledge.New curriculum reform of our country requires the junior middle school students to enhance their understanding of world culture in the process of English learning in order to cultivate the students’ cross-cultural communication. Schema theory means what a reader gain from a text is not simply built on the information provided by the text, but involves the reader’s previously acquired knowledge that is called background knowledge. The schema is the structure of the background knowledge. Meanwhile, the application of schema theory in English reading class will be able to help junior middle school students grasp the connotation, the structure and even the main idea of the passage to make reading comprehension easier. Therefore,it is necessary for the teachers to make students acquire cultural background knowledge as much as possible.The purpose of this research is to study the present situation of cultural introduction in junior middle school and to test whether the introduction of cultural background knowledge can improve students’ reading comprehension.The hypothesis of the research is that the introduction of cultural background knowledge can improve students’ English reading comprehension ability.To achieve the purpose, the author carried out an experiment. The subjects are 80 students chosen from junior I at No. 35 Middle School in Hohhot,Inner Mongolia. The research instruments are a questionnaire, interviews for teachers, an English cultural test and an English reading test. Through the experimental research, the conclusion drawn from the data analysis is that cultural background knowledge can improve students’ reading comprehension ability. Therefore, it is a good idea for our English teachers to introduce some interesting customs as well as foreign teaching habits in English reading class,which will stimulate the students’ interest and attract the students’ attention so as to improve the students’ reading ability. To achieve this, English teachers need continuing and lifelong education and have the capability of self-improvement to advance professional development.