A Review Of Contents And Methods Of 20-year Culture Teaching Research In China

Language is the carrier of culture as well as the main forms of culture. Language is one of the most important parts of social ethnic culture, which develops as the development of the nation. Different nations have different cultures, histories, customs and conditions, which are reflected by their different languages. Language cannot be separated from culture while culture depends on language. English teaching is the language teaching. It, of course, includes cultural teaching. In other words, language can not exist without culture and foreign language teaching can not separate language from its culture and history. Professor Dong Yafen points,"Any kind of national language is the carrier and important part of the nation. In the materials, paragraph,sentence,and even every word contains the cultural information of that nation."(Dong, 1997) American educator Winston Blunmburg once said,"Adopting a teaching method which only knows the language rather than the culture is the best way to cultivate a fool who is good at language fluency."(He, 1997) Most foreign educators say that it is more difficult for foreigner to bear the cultural mistakes than the grammar mistakes. In this way, the importance of cultural teaching is obvious.In the educational world of foreign language teaching, many experts and scholars realize that intercultural communication research is imperative. The only language competence education can not meet the requirements of the society. The utmost purpose of foreign language teaching is to cultivate students'intercultural communicative competence. To a large extent, language teaching is cultural teaching. In recent twenty years, Chinese scholars have made a lot studies about cultural teaching, which mainly displays on two points: the contents of cultural teaching and the methods of culture teaching.This paper centers on these two subjects, collects 45 pieces of articles about contents and methods of culture teaching in foreign language education written by Chinese researcher from 12 important journals of foreign language as well as 10 famous monographs and make a review of them. In recent twenty years, the topics of contents of culture teaching in foreign language education are verbal communication, non-verbal communication, communicative customs and etiquette, social structure and personal relationship, values, and integration of native culture and target language culture. The most frequently research topics are verbal and non-verbal communication. The methods of culture teaching in foreign language education involve five aspects: curriculum design, compiling and selection of teaching materials, methods and techniques, teachers'role and students'role. The category of methods and techniques can be further divided into four subcategories: culture analysis and comparison, overview introduction, error analysis, literary works analysis and special education. The mostly mentioned methods are teacher's role and compiling and selection of teaching materials.