The Study Of Teacher's Role As Mediator In Classroom Culture Teaching

With a general review of the literatures about the relations among language, culture and thought and some other major issues concerning culture teaching, it is offered that learning a new language is a process of learning a new culture which involves the learner's cognitive and affective development. After the literature review of constructivism, humanism, social interactionism and their implications to language teaching, Patrick R. Moran's experiential learning cycle of culture knowings is introduced, which offers the major aspects of the study on teacher's role as mediator in classroom culture teaching. From these literature reviews, it is concluded that the development of the students' personal competence can not only help their understanding of all foreign cultures but also promote the perfection of their personality.Mediator is a term used by social interactionist psychologists to refer to the significant people in learners' learning, who select and organize appropriate stimuli, shape and present them in a way that is sure to provide best positive outcomes. Their action is known as mediation. Mediator is regarded as a key factor in effective learning and fundamental in transmitting culture. Therefore, a major hypothesis in this paper is that the degree of teacher's mediation in classroom culture teaching has an effect on the development of students' sociocultural competence, especially in an EFL context. Four ways are used to test the hypothesis, that is, a questionnaire study on the source of students' English sociocultural knowledge, a sociocultural test, a questionnaire study on teacher's mediation and the interviews with some teachers.First, 160 non-English majors, who had finished learning New Horizon College English (Book IV) were randomly selected from eight classes at Anhui Financial University. They answered a short questionnaire followed by a sociocultural test based on the textbook.The sociocultural test is made up of 38 objective test items in three parts, concerning the cultural information relevant to New Horizon College English (Book IV). They are non-verbal behavior part, verbal behavior part and cultural background knowledge part.Then, the teachers of English in these classes were asked to finish a questionnaire to...