Cross-Cultural Communication And English Teaching In Middle Schools

With the development of communication and transportation, the globalization of world economy, the widespread population migrations that lead to multicultural workforce and society, intercultural communicative competence becomes a required ability for citizens in the 21st century to survive and live meaningfully and productively. To communicate effectively with people from different culture, an individual needs to develop an intercultural competence — that can be built from the ability of intercultural awareness, sensitivity and competence. In short, respect for other culture is the foundation of effective intercultural communication. Our ELT should be a practical and effective procedure in developing students' intercultural communicative competence, which is almost ignored in middle schools because of the test-oriented teaching aim, the different levels of the teachers' quality and other causes. This paper is concerned with the contribution and incorporation of the teaching of culture into the foreign language classroom in middle schools. Special consideration is given to the declination of the necessities in the ways of culture teaching. It has demonstrated that teaching a foreign language is not only to give an instruction on syntactic structures or on learning new words and expressions, but also to incorporate some cultural elements, which are intertwined with language itself, to help students to apply the necessary skills to communication and deal with problems arising from intercultural interactions so as to improve their competence in intercultural communication in their personal, social and professional lives. Furthermore, an attempt is made to incorporate culture into the classroom through introducing some currently-used techniques and methods. The main purpose of the thesis is to demonstrate that effective communication is more than a matter of language proficiency and that, apart from enhancing and enriching communicative...