A Study Of Application Of Cultural Introduction In Higher Vocational College English Teaching

With the rapid development of information technology and economic globalization, intercultural communication between China and foreign countries is greatly increasing. After graduation, higher vocational college students have far more chances and channels to communicate with people from English-speaking countries, which challenges the intercultural communicative competence of students and the current higher vocational college English teaching as well. However, traditional language teaching tends to focus on linguistic knowledge, while ignoring the important role of cultural knowledge. Although having a wide vocabulary and abundant grammatical knowledge, the majority of students lack the capability of proper use of the target language. Consequently, in order to explore the positive effects of culture teaching on English teaching and learning in higher vocational colleges, the author conducted a one-semester-long teaching experiment, aiming at proving the feasibility and effectiveness of cultural introduction in higher vocational college English teaching. Through this research, the author expects to make students and language teachers from higher vocational colleges attach more importance to cultural introduction, to help students enhance their cross-cultural awareness and improve their intercultural communicative competence, and to supply some suggestions for language teachers in their teaching practice.The thesis firstly illustrates the definitions and classifications of culture, explores the close relationship between language and culture, and introduces the three stages of development of culture teaching and the goals of culture teaching. The history of researches on culture teaching both at home and abroad is also presented. To investigate the current situation of culture teaching and learning in higher vocational colleges, a test for students and a survey for language teachers are designed. By analyzing the results, the author finds that (1) students in higher vocational colleges are quite short of cultural knowledge and they have many difficulties in using the target language appropriately on different occasions; (2) due to the shortage of systematic teaching materials for cultural introduction, inadequate professional training concerning culture teaching and their own lack of cross-cultural awareness, language teachers in higher vocational colleges lay little emphasis on cultural introduction in English class; (3) both students and language teachers attach insufficient importance to cultural introduction in English class. Based on the data and analysis obtained from the investigations, the author conducted a 17-week-long experiment for the purpose of further confirming the necessity and importance of cultural introduction, and testifying the positive effects of culture teaching on English learning and teaching. The subjects are 140 freshmen from Shandong Vocational College of Industry, who are at the similar language proficiency level and have similar amount of cultural knowledge. The subjects are divided into two classes, namely the experimental class and the control class. During the experiment, the author integrated culture teaching into language teaching in the experimental class, while adopting traditional teaching methods in the control class. At the end of the experiment, two questionnaires and two tests are used as the instruments to get relevant data and the data collected are analyzed strictly and scientifically by Microsoft Excel 2003 and SPSS 13.0. By comparing the results between the control class and the experimental class, the author draws conclusions that cultural introduction in English class can improve students'language proficiency, cultivate their cross-cultural awareness and improve their intercultural communicative competence; it is also useful to increase students'interest in language learning, enhance students'motivation and make students learn English more independently. Therefore, it can be concluded that integrating culture teaching into language teaching is a feasible and effective teaching mode in higher vocational college English teaching. In view of the problems discovered in the experiment and the difficulties encountered in the teaching process, the author explores the principles, the contents and the approaches to cultural introduction. Finally, the author summarizes the main findings of this research, indicates several limitations of this research and suggests two aspects for future research.