A Study On The Role Of Cultural Background Knowledge In College English Listening Teaching

Nowadays the world has become a global village with the development of globalization. The frequent communications of people throughout the world make people have global awareness, and also make intercultural communication has become a necessity and distinguish feature in our times. Meanwhile, intercultural communicative competence has become a prerequisite for successful intercultural communication. English, as an international language, has been used more and more widely for Chinese learners. The background knowledge of English-speaking countries is essential to a successful communication because people from different cultures can not avoid problems of cultural discrepancy. Therefore, adequate attention should be focused on cultivating intercultural awareness and enhancing intercultural communicative competence during English language teaching and learning. English listening ability as the most basic skill in the five linguistic skills of them for successful communication between Chinese learners and English speakers. Only skillful at linguistic skills, such as grammar, vocabulary and syntax, can be far away from the needs of cross-cultural communication. How to provide sufficient cultural background knowledge and how to improve effectively English learners' intercultural awareness and competence becomes a hot issue for College English teachers and researchers.In order to solve these problems, the author made questionnaires for 24 teachers and 189 students to explore the target culture background knowledge in CELT in Dalian Ocean University. The author found that more and more students have realized the importance and influence of target culture in listening; the students' willing to accept more cultural knowledge learning; the main barrier and the best device during the input of cultural knowledge in class. The result of the questionnaire for teachers showed that the teachers hold the positive attitude to culture teaching based on schema theory; however, some the current situation in CELT should not be ignored: students' different basis in listening comprehension; teachers' lack of target cultural knowledge; the curriculum of listening is too less and loose. All these make the cultural teaching in CELT face with many difficulties during practical teaching.Based on the empirical study in this paper, author pointed out some strategies of the input of cultural knowledge in CELT to cultivate and improve intercultural communicative and then put forward some teaching suggestions.