7.3 Multimedia Assisted Teaching 12

7.4 Organizing a Variety of Extracurricular Activities 12

8. Conclusion 12

Works Cited 14

1. Introduction

Nowadays, culture plays a more and more important role in middle school English teaching. With the rapid development of modernization and globalization, the world itself is becoming a “global village”. China has more chances to cooperate with foreign countries around the world. Meanwhile, with the opportunities to contact with westerners, Chinese people also faces a lot of difficulties in communication. English becomes very important and popular for our Chinese. But learning English well is not easy for many Chinese students. One of the reasons is most of them neglect the different culture background between Chinese and English. As we know, language has an intimate relation with culture. And actually, culture plays a very important role in English teaching

Chenshen once proposed, due to the differences in geography, development level and religion, different countries would have different cultures, misunderstandings often occur in English teaching, and the same expression always has a lot of understandings to different people in different cultures.  Even though we always try to get rid of misunderstandings, displeasure always comes into existence. In fact, English teaching can not be separated from culture teaching, so, cultivating cultural awareness has attracted more and more attention in all of the English classrooms all over China. Just as Professor Deng Yanchang once said “…In fact, the learning of a language is inseparable from the learning of its culture.” Even so, after several years of English study, most students including college graduates who were major in English can not communicate with westerners properly. Actually, they have a perfect grasp of words, grammar and structures. One of the reasons is that they have ignored the cultivation of English cultural awareness during their studying years. Of course, everyone knows that it is not all their fault, part of the blame should be placed on the current situation of English education. So, for English teachers in the future, we must grasp the key and golden points in English culture teaching, my passage here just focuses on some personal views in what I have mentioned above.

The tasks in middle school English teaching are not only such things as teaching pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar, we should also take some cultures of western countries into consideration. Cultivating cultural awareness is the main part of English teaching. But firstly, we must learn about what is so called culture in English teaching. Culture mainly includes historical geography, local customs and practices, traditional customs, lifestyle, literature and art, code and conduct and values.  As we all have learnt English for years, we all know that during our middle school time, our English teachers didn’t teach us western cultures systematically and roundly, we learned western cultures here and there, only when it is necessary did our teachers teach us some western cultures.  So, I think such kind of recessive cultural awareness cultivation is more suitable in middle school English teaching, but what deserves to be mentioned is that after a large proportion of the recessive culture teaching, maybe English teachers could integrate and tease it systematically.

In order to get rid of misunderstandings when communicating with English native speakers, both teachers and students should know the differences between Chinese and western cultures, so, we can even say that teaching and learning a foreign language itself is a process of teaching and learning its culture, how to teach culture is the key. This thesis aims to find out the importance of cultivating cultural awareness and give some methods on the way of teaching English culture.源'自:751]'论-文'网"]www.751com.cn 论中学英语教学中跨文化意识的培养(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_57780.html