An Experimental Study Of VAK Approach In English Culture Teaching In Junior High School

Culture teaching plays an important role in middle school English teaching.In the new English curriculum standard that has already been implemented,cross-cultural communication ability has been raised as the goal of basic English education for the first time.The relationship between culture teaching and language teaching and how to teach culture have always been a focus of the scholars.Since Dunn.Reid(1993)put forward VAK approach on the basis of learning style,audio-visual approach has been widely used in foreign language teaching.Then,can VAK,which is applied in language knowledge and skill teaching,be used in culture teaching?Based on learning style theory and experiential learning theory,this research adopted an experiment to investigate the effect of VAK approach on culture learning of the target language.The writer had chosen two parallel classes in grade 8 of the High School Attached to Hunan University.One was control group(total number:46),and the other was experimental group(total number:49).The teaching material was an article about western table manners.Students from these two groups were required to write two compositions about western table manners.One was written immediately after the class,the other was written two weeks later.Two English teachers were invited to mark students' compositions.This experimental study aims to explore the following two questions:(1)What effect will VAK approach have on the culture learning of students in experimental class?(2)What factors contribute to the difference of the performance between the control and experimental group?In order to answer the research questions,SPSS 19.0 was applied to analyze the results of the immediate post-test and the delayed post-test of both the control group and the experimental group by Descriptive Analysis,Standard deviation analysis.Independent sample test and Paired sample test.The independent sample test statistics show:(1)In the immediate post-test,there is significant difference of the scores between these two groups(sig=0.038<0.05)and the score of experimental class is higher than that of control class;(2)In the delayed post-test,the difference is significant(sig= 0.012<0.05),and the score of experimental class is higher than that of control class;The paired sample test statistics show:(1)The difference of the scores of the control group between immediate and delayed post-test is very significant(sig=0.009<0.05);(2)The difference of the scores of the experimental group between immediate and delayed post-test is significant(sig=0.041<0.05).The results show that compared with the traditional English culture teaching method,VAK teaching approach has a better influence on students" English culture leaning.Besides,the results show that VAK approach is more effective in the retention of the knowledge.Therefore,VAK approach which is usually used in language knowledge and skill teaching can also be used in culture teaching.