A Study On Fostering Cultural Awareness To Solve The Problems Of Cultural Interference In Senior High School ESL Teaching

With the development of science and technology, it is more frequently for people tocommunicate with each other than any time in history. As people from different cultures’communication become more and more popular, we are not allowed to ignore the existence ofcross-cultural communication. We English teachers must improve our concept of Englishteaching as well as permeate ideas of cultural communication. So it is quite necessary for usto pay attention to the students’ specialty, and stimulate their cultural awareness to meet thedemand of cross-cultural communication. As we know, the diverse cultural differencesbetween countries can’t be avoided, because of cultural differences; misunderstandings mayarise, which will lead to unsatisfactory communication, although the language use incommunication may be faultless. So it is quite necessary to have a good knowledge of culturein the English teaching process. Due to the cultural differences, we English teachers shouldconvey some effective cultural information of the target language to the students, which canhelp them to overcome cultural interference in the cross-cultural communication. Byobtaining adequate cultural information, the students can communicate efficiently with peoplefrom another culture and improve their communicative competence accordingly.As for the present educational background of China, though many teachers show greatinterest in the education of communicative approach, they usually adopt new teachingmethods blindly with no clear theoretical basis. Naturally there are times when they fail andthrow it away quickly. While most teachers still put their attention mainly on the developmentof students’ linguistic competence instead of students’ cultural awareness, which results in thefailure of communication. As a result, although the students have received several years offormal English education and had good grades in school, they still learn “mute and dumb oralEnglish” or creating some "Chinglish"(Chinese English). There is no doubt that they still havedifficulties in communicating freely.According to the present situation of English teaching in China, we teachers must learn tolay emphasis on the conveying of cultural information. So the purpose for this thesis is firstlyto make sense of the concept of culture and the relationship between culture and language,then to exhibit some related information of cross-cultural communication in English teachingand finally to raise some practical and teaching strategies and to help students overcome thebarriers of cultural interferences to promote their cross-cultural communicative competence.