Research On The Current Situation Of Cultural Knowledge Treatment In New Standard English For Senior High School

Cultivation of cultural awareness has been paid much attention since more and more people realized the relationship between language and culture. In 2003, the Ministry of Education published CSSE(2003) to emphasize the importance of culture teaching. Culture teaching gradually becomes the center of foreign language teaching. However, there are a few researches on cultural knowledge and culture teaching.Based on this condition, the following three questions are presented and solved through analyzing 6 English teachers’ and 100 students’ treatment on cultural knowledge in NSE(2005),which reflects the current situation of culture teaching. Teachers and students are from Grade 2,Langzhong High School, Sichuan province.1) What are teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards cultural knowledge in NSE(2005)?2) How do English teachers and students deal with cultural knowledge in NSE(2005), and why?3) What are teachers’ and students’ views on culture teaching?In order to solve these questions, three instruments are adopted--classroom observation aiming to observe the real situation of culture teaching and record teachers’ teaching methods, interview aiming at finding teachers’ and students’ attitudes to cultural knowledge and culture teaching, and questionnaires for pointing out students’ favorite culture teaching method and their learning ways.According to the data collected from observation, questionnaires and interviews, there are three findings presented in chapter five. Firstly, most teachers and students are satisfied with the cultural knowledge in NSE(2005), though some of them don’t take care of the contents. Secondly, teachers usually adopt these methods to teach cultural contents: showing pictures, playing videos, introducing culture-related information, arranging activities, and assigning homework. Among them, most students are in favor of watching videos and making discussion. For students, they usually read newspapers, magazines, works and watch original films after class. In class, they make presentation,dialog and preview the passages. Thirdly, all teachers and students have realized the importance of culture teaching and noticed the cultivation of cultural awareness, since they found the intimate relationship between culture and language.The thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter one is introduction which introduces research background, research purposes, research significance and layout of the thesis. Chapter two is literature review which introduces some basic concepts and reviews previous studies abroad and at home. Chapter three is methodology consisting of research questions, subjects, instruments andresearch procedure. Chapter four is results and discussion which presents all the results and similarities and differences between this research and previous studies. Chapter five makes conclusion about findings and provides implications to teachers and students. It also illustrates the limitations of this research and gives some suggestions for further researches.