A Research On Culturally Responsive Teaching In Junior Middle Schools

In the past, the junior high school teacher would act as a knowledge authority in the process of English teaching. Teaching English was meant that the teacher taught students to read new words, explain the difficult and important point of grammar, hardly involving in the Chinese and foreign cultural background and less related to the students’ life experience. This leads to a bad result. In addition to the increased paper scores, most of the students’ comprehensive language-using ability is still in stepping stage after years of English study. The phenomenon of "Culture Aphasia", "English weariness" and "English Learning Useless" are worth pondering for every educator. Junior high school students are in the critical period of physical and mental development. English learning should not just for the sake of the scores for entrance. What is of great importance to find the charm of the language, to understand the language and to use the language properly though the learning of English. Understanding cultural differences in language use and reflecting on the cultural phenomenon, teachers should respond to the learner’s personal cultural awareness, cultural values, etc, which aims at cultivating ethnic cultural pride, cultural understanding and cultural sensitivity in communication, strengthening learners’ awareness of the world. As independent individuals, students are not empty their heads into the classroom, but have more than ten years of life experience and years of accumulated English learning outcomes. Teachers should respond to the students’ life experience, associated it with foreign language learning. Inspired in culturally responsive teaching, the author tries to explore how the culturally responsive teaching apply to English subject in our country, so that it can provide some practical guidance in the junior middle school English teaching.This thesis is divided into four parts:The first part, introduction, mainly elaborated the research origin, purpose and significance of this paper, research ideas and methods, and comb the existing research.The second part is mainly to the interpretation of the concept of the paper, including the definition of culture, cultural classification and definition of culture, and then explores what the cultural response to. Finally, define the method "culturally responsive teaching", which comes from American, in terms of its meaning and characteristic.The third part is to investigate and analyze the present situation of junior high school English teachers’ culture responsive teaching. According to the questionnaire results of two junior high school teachers in Wuhan city, the author found that in the process of junior middle school English teaching, most of the English teachers do quite understand the students in the class. Almost all English teachers accept and agree with the importance of culture in students’ English learning. They are able to make proper culture response in teaching, although such response is more from the perspective of increasing the interest in teaching English. The good news is that English teachers have a clear understanding to their Chinese and foreign cultural literacy and spare no effort in improving the status quo. Cultural responsive teaching in English class is necessary and feasible.The fourth part is to analyze the content of cultural response in English teaching. The author explores the ways of the cultural response in English teaching as well as the core content of cultural response.The fifth part is mainly to explore the junior middle school English cultural response teaching strategy. Based on the discussion of the way of cultural response in junior high school English teaching, the author explores the three kinds of English culture responsive teaching methods:interactive teaching method, environment edify method, and inquiry teaching.The conclusion part is to summarize the whole article, emphasizing the necessity of carrying out cultural responsive teaching in junior middle school, further pointing out that English teaching should be combined with culture and students’ life experience. Finally, thinking about English culturally responsive teaching is a big challenge to those teachers who have limited time and energy.