On Introducing Cultural Input Into College English Teaching

This thesis is based on the research achievements of scholars at home and abroad on intercultural communication and culture teaching since the 1960s'. It expounds the importance of cultural factors hi EFL teaching through an elaborate analysis of the sociocultural test, and strives to probe into the new approaches of culture input into college English teaching.The theoretical foundation of culture teaching lies in the researches of linguistics, anthropology and psychology. In the fields of linguistics and language teaching, Halliday and Robert Lado maintain that the target culture is an important factor which can not be ignored in foreign language learning. Hymes also asserts that a language should be seen as an organization of diversity, its use is affected by many factors of which culture is an important part. According to his theory of communicative competence, linguistic ability is just one of the four components of communicative competence; sociocultural ability is also an important factor for the competence of communicating appropriately. In China, it is until the 1980s' that scholars began to attach importance to the research on intercultural communication as well as culture teaching. Mr. Xu Guozhang once indicated that, in different languages, many words with equivalent surface meanings have different cultural connotations in fact due to different traditions and value systems. Henceforth many scholars began to pay attention to the cultural problems involved in cross-cultural communication and in foreign language teaching. The contribution of anthropology to the study of culture is tremendous. The famous anthropologist Edward Hall published his masterpiece The Silent Language in 1959. In this book, Hall delves into the relationship between culture and language as well as nonverbal communication. Hall emphasizes the importance of culture in human communication, and reveals the interacted relations between language and culture. He holds that there is not one aspect of human life that is not touched and altered byculture. Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf once produced a hypothesis on the relation between language and culture. They hold that language structure can not only reflect culture, but also determine people's world view. In the field of psychology, Geert Hofstede makes a thorough analysis of culture and cultural differences in his famous works Culture's Consequences and Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. Hofstede calls culture "mental programming" and "software of the mind". He maintains that culture is just like the programs of a computer, which controls the behaviors of human beings to some degree.However, in the EFL teaching practice in China, little attention has been paid to the cultural connotation of language. In June, 2001, the present writer conducted a test on students' sociocultural knowledge. The subjects are 187 students in their second year at Wuhan Finance College. The content of the test is about the sociocultural knowledge of Britain and America which covers four aspects: conventional culture, historical culture, geographical culture and cognitive culture. The result of the test reveals the fact that students are not so acquainted with the sociocultural information of the target language.In view of this situation, the present writer advances some considerations and methods on culture teaching. Certainly the focus of language teaching should be on the elementary linguistic knowledge; but how to carry out effective cultural input in the process of teaching language knowledge is an urgent task facing college English teaching. This is also at the core of the research scope of this essay. The author of the present thesis suggests adopting different methods to breed students' sociocultural ability in class and out of class. In the classroom activities, teachers may provide cultural input through linguistic knowledge instruction and language skills training Lecturing on the vocabulary rich in cultural connotations and imparting cultural background knowledge neces...