Chinese Cultural Penetration And Cross-cultural Awareness Cultivation In ELT In Vocational Colleges

In current English teaching process, cultivating students'intercultural communicative competence has become one of the main objectives of ELT. Integrating culture teaching into language teaching is a necessary way to improve the students'communicative competence and avoid communication failures. This has been almost accepted by most researchers and English teachers around both in China and in other countries.The main aim of English teaching in vocational colleges is to cultivate the students' international communicative competence for business affairs. However, the achievement of culture teaching can only be seen in the teaching of target culture, with the English learners' native culture totally ignored. The English teachers often focus on introducing the western culture to their listeners, and the students learn more about the western culture as a result of teaching more target culture.For Chinese students, the lack of home culture learning leads to students' poor expressiveness of Chinese culture, and on the other hand, it impedes the cultivation of students' intercultural communicative competence. Since intercultural communication is a kind of two-way activity and this feature determines that native culture should be included in the culture teaching in ELT. It is evident that English learning does not simply aim at learning about western culture, it also aims at having a better understanding of Chinese culture and transmitting it to the world in English. Now it has been a hot issue in the field of English language teaching about how to develop students' capability to express Chinese culture in English as well as linguistic competence and abundant western cultural knowledge, so as to achieve effective intercultural communication.With the support of theories of the relationship among language, culture and intercultural communication, the thesis aims to explore the possibilities and effectiveness of teaching Chinese culture in ELT in vocational schools. Some activities have been displayed in the process of experiment to explore and discuss some practical methods of teaching Chinese culture in English. In the process of Chinese culture teaching, various Chinese traditional culture materials have been chosen as the content of Chinese culture teaching. The experimental students are encouraged to learn Chinese culture through different effective activities organized by the teacher, such as translation of Chinese culturally loaded words, the comparison of western custom and Chinese custom, appreciation of Chinese traditional culture, etc. They are guided to use different media and other sources to obtain Chinese cultural information.Based on the result of the experiment the author is proved to be successful in introducing Chinese culture into English class. The positive results of the study shows that it is effective to teach Chinese culture in ELT in vocational colleges. Not only can it let the students get much knowledge, but also it can improve their cross-cultural awareness and cultivate their personality, confidence, tolerance as well as interests in English language learning. It will be of great benefit to the students in the business affairs involved in the future.