【正文】 ry to teach culture anyway, and the teaching of the basic linguistic knowledge is the most important thing. Most teachers have never received special training before or after they bee a teacher. They have not been educated under a program that embraces both linguistic forms and sociocultural contents. They are not equipped with such awareness or knowledge when they first bee a teacher. Moreover, the teacher themselves lack direct contact with foreign culture, since most of them have not got the chance of going abroad, which is the best way of familiarizing oneself with the foreign culture and developing cultural awareness. So they are not as experienced in culture instruction as in language points and structures teaching in English lessons. Therefore, they themselves need to be sensitive to the importance of culture instruction in language teaching and gain a maximum of knowledge about target culture. What’s more, they should develop cultural awareness and have an appropriate cultural understanding about target culture. The methods of the culture education are too single In most middle schools, English teachers teach culture education only through textbooks, they rely on textbooks too much, so as to in the whole teaching process lacking of innovation and interaction。 On the other hand, the teaching of culture is only regarded as a supportive means to improve students’ linguistic petence. English language teaching emphasizes on explaining and practicing words, phrase, sentence pattern, or general idea of paragraph. This pattern exerts a positive effect on studying language knowledge and grasping language skills, but some obvious drawbacks exist in this kind of pattern of teaching, because it neglects the existing of culture that language is the carrier of it. At present, in the middle school, the examoriented education is still influencing the teachers’ teaching idea seriously. Some teachers only emphasize on studying the language knowledge and spend most of time in teaching the knowledge of vocabularies, expressions and grammars in the classroom. Some teachers pay more attention to training the language ability of students, especially the cultivation of reading, but they ignore the cultivation of the munication ability of language during English teaching. As a result, students could only understand the language knowledge, but could not reach the understanding layer of the cultural knowledge. Though students have possessed language ability, they have not totally possessed the munication ability of language. In this case, students are good at language using。 however, they still often cause the misunderstanding in munication. They are the products of traditional teaching methods and examoriented teaching IV. Approaches to put culture education into English teaching in middle schools Teaching English is also teaching English culture. The importance of teaching culture has been discussed a lot and widely recognized. Now how to cultivate cultural awareness and make culture education diversity in middle school is also a problem which all English teachers confront. The following are some approaches I have ever adopted in my teaching. Studying cultureloaded vocabulary Vocabulary just likes the basis foundation of language building. Vocabulary is the most active and cultureloaded element in a language, the culture features of a munity are usually first reflected from vocabulary. So teaching vocabulary is the initial step to teach culture. A word usually has three layers of meaninglexical meaning, structural meaning and socialcultural meaning, among which the third layer of meaning is the most difficult to seize, because it touches upon social experiences. Therefore, teachers should draw students’ attention to the specific meaning and usage of the cultureloaded words, especially those words that are often used by native speakers of English, in order to expand their vocabularies and to increase their municative petence in conveying different moods and connotations satisfactorily. Superficially equivalent words or terms may express different cultural psychology, or arouse different associations. In China， the meaning of “dragon” is colorful. “Dragon” is a mythical animal in ancient China with fiveclawed, which could walk, fly and summon wind and rain. It is a symbol of emperors in Chinese feudal Society. But in English, dragon” is a kind of violent creature. This kind of phenomena also can be found in many words. The term of Red is usually associated with celebrations and joyful occasions. For example, At the Spring Festival, it is customary for the Chinese to post up antithetical couplets written on the red scrolls, to put on the red Chinese character“福 ”and to hang the red lanterns in order to create a joyful festival atmosphere. The money given to children as a lunar New Year gift is usually covered in a piece of red paper for the purpose of expressing good wills. On the contrary, it is associated with war, blood, terror, anger, crime and debt in western culture, such as “redhanded”, “see red”, “wave a red flag”, “red ink”, and “be in the red”. The following are some examples concerned with red. (1)He is a man of much red blood. (2)Richard’s ing late made his teacher see red. (3)They argued until everyone was red in the face. (4)The thief was caught redhanded. The” red blood” in sentence (1) means dynamism or vigor. In sentences (2) and (3), “red” should be understood as a rage, while in sentence (4) “catch somebody redhanded” refers to being caught on the spot. Introducing a specific cultural feature through words learning is an effective way to increase students’ cultural awareness. It is obvious that foreign language learning is firstly made up of words understanding. Many teachers tend to teach students word