Role Of Cultural Context In ELT And Cultivation Of Cross-cultural Awareness

In order to understand accurately meanings of English words and expressions, English learners have to resort to the linguistic and non-linguistic contexts as the sole determiner. The non-linguistic context is a most complex system including all the factors material or spiritual, of which cultural contextual elements are of key significance.Language and culture are interdependent and they influence each other. Being an intrinsic part of culture, language carries culture, mirrors culture, spreads culture and helps develop culture. On the other hand, every culture must attach certain cultural connotations to its language.Cultural context plays a very important role in English Language Teaching (ELT) as the same object or act carries distinct national flavors into different cultural groups that may puzzle or even shock foreigners. Cultural differences cause lots of differences between English and Chinese, and these differences are also reflected in words of the two languages. In order to have a better understanding of English words in English language learning, learners need to study the cultural connotations of words, which vary mainly with the different cultural backgrounds.As a teacher who teaches college English in China, the present author holds that a language teacher should put much effort into not only theoretical research, but also teaching practice in which the cultivation of learners' cultural insight and cross-cultural awareness should be emphasized. In order to conduct English teaching practice more effectively and fruitfully, the author puts forward three suggestions from the perspective of cultural teaching based on the analysis of cultural information in Contemporary College English (a recently published textbook series for the English majors). The author believes that the target language and culture should be viewed as a new world to be shown to learners, and that the clashes and conflicts between learners' native culture and foreign culture are used to create contexts in which learners' cognitive growth and personality development are initiated. The main approaches used in this thesis to solve the problems include the comparative analysis, example analysis and on-the-spot investigation.Of course, culture is never static. One should be cautious in making static generalization on social behavior of the people of a particular culture. There are also some constraints and limitations in the thesis. However, it is wished that the paper could open a new chapter for the investigation along the line.