A Survey Of Culture Introduction In English Teaching For Primary Schools

Language is a part of culture.It contains culture background as well.As Spair said: “ There are something behind language,language and culture can not be departed,If you don't understand culture,you won't understand language.” Learning a language is not just a process to learn vocabulary,phonetics,grammar,but also a process to learn culture.Without learning culture,the learners will be hard to use the language.Primary school English Curriculum Standards(2011)list culture awareness as main five English teaching objectives.As a result,developing primary school students' interest and understanding in foreign culture becomes a main purpose to be achieved.This essay demonstrates the reason why the author does the survey and the purpose and significance to do the survey.This survey focuses on culture introduction in English teaching for primary schools stage.The author also discusses the relationship between language and culture,culture elements and culture introduction in language teaching.In this essay,the author choose questionnaire,interview and classroom observation as the main research methods.The design of the survey is clearly demonstrated.Research questions,the design of questionnaire,the design of the interview and the design of classroom observation are show in this chapter.The results from field survey are analyzed.The subjects of the survey are three primary schools in Chengdu and 18 teachers for questionnaire and 9 teachers for the interview.The author tries to find the culture awareness,attitude and the teaching ways and strategies of the teachers to deal with cultural contents,also to give suggestions to existing problems.There are also 258 students tested by questionnaire to provide a reference of the culture knowledge of the students.According to the results,1.In the teaching process,teachers prefer to choose local condition and customs as teaching contents.2.In the ways of dealing with those contents,they mainly use culture contrast,brief introduction of word connotations and create cultural situation or cultural activities.3.As to the ways to acquire culture knowledge,teachers often use Internet and culture books.According to the Questionnaire for the students,it shows that students are highly interested in learning culture knowledge.They mainly acquire culture knowledge from the textbook.What they like most to learn are local conditions and customs of western countries.With the Primary School English Curriculum Standards issued,teachers pay more attention to the development of students' culture awareness,while there are still some problems such as without fully use of teaching materials,a lack of systematic ways,different reserve of teachers' cultural knowledge,limitations of teaching material,which all become the stumbling block in implement of culture introduction.Culture introduction in proper time and with proper amount improve students learning ability and teaching quality.To know how target-language native speakers' mind,behavior,customs could inspire students learning motivations.Hence,culture introduction has long way to go in primary schools.Teachers should continually practice and organize teaching methods of culture introduction,fully activate teaching materials and improve individual cultural knowledge,so as to lay foundation for next stage of language teaching.