A Survey Of Cultural Input In English Teaching In Junior High Schools

With the promotion of globalization,there is an increasing exchange and integration among different countries.Under such a background,it's urgent to cultivate students' cultural consciousness and improve their communication ability in English teaching.Meanwhile,cultivating students' cultural consciousness is one of the objectives in the Senior High School English Curriculum Standards.It's hard for students who have received only the linguistic training to communicate with native speakers,which makes English teachers face new requirements.Based on the context theory and cross-cultural communication theory as well as literature review both at home and abroad,this paper conducted a survey on three senior high schools in Huaibei City,Anhui province.First of all,280 students and 35 teachers are selected from the three schools.The aim is to find out whether students and teachers take an interest in culture and to what level culture input has been done.Besides,some teachers were interviewed from the above-mentioned schools so as to provide some other information for the survey.Then,some class observations are discussed in details.Finally,according to the research data and results,some reflections on current cultural input teaching have been made and several suggestions have been put forward to promote this kind of teaching.The main findings of this study are as follows: the majority of English teachers acknowledge that cultural input plays an important part in English teaching.However,the observations show that the methods teachers use and content about cultural input are limited.There is a huge gap between practice and theory.Besides,high school students still lack in motivation to learn cultural knowledge on their own.There are four suggestions as follows: 1.Teachers' cultural teaching ability and cultural literacy should be improved;2.Teachers should be organizers and instructors for students' extracurricular activities;3.It is necessary to add some specialized courses andestablish high-quality cultural resources platforms for students to use;4.It is a must to create a more scientific examination and evaluation systems in order to improve the environment of cultural input.