A Survey On Cultivating The Cultural Literacy Of Senior High School Students In A County

Recently cultivating cultural literacy of students has been paid more and more attention to in English teaching research gradually.Many scholars have carried out theoretical and empirical research on cultivating the cultural literacy of students,including the relationship between language and culture,the strategies to cultivate students' cultural awareness and cultural competence.However,such previous research mainly focuses on college students.This thesis centers on county senior middle school students and the situation of their cultural literacy.The aim of this research is to find out the true condition,including merits and deficiencies,and to explore more strategies in order to aid teachers in senior high schools to foster the cultural literacy of students.The methodologies of questionnaire and interviews were adopted in the study.In order to find out the condition of cultivating the English cultural literacy of senior high school students in Jiayu No.l Middle School,the author asked 124 students to fill in a questionnaire and interviewed six teachers in different grades.According to the study,about half of the students recognize the importance of teaching cultural knowledge.However,only one tenth of the students care about cultural phenomena in their English learning.As the questionnaire and the interview show,the students lack English cultural knowledge and the teachers pay more attention to teaching language knowledge than cultural knowledge to some extent.Meanwhile,most of the teachers find it hard to spare time to deal with cultural teaching with the overwhelming influence of the college entrance examination,insufficient time and resources.Based on the research,several effective suggestions on cultivating students' cultural literacy have been proposed,such as digging out the cultural elements in the textbooks,conducting cultural experiences,making cultural comparison,improving the assessment systems and so on.