Cultural Instruction And Its Position In China's Tefl

In language is clothed culfore; and for that maller a language plays avery important role in boosting a culture. Scholars of social scienceshave come forth with the proposition that language holds culture in placethe way a keystone does an arch. Therefore they maintain that in theabsence of a language viability of a cultUre would be out of the question.On the other handso they affirmeculture conditions developmefit oflanguage; and in the broadest sense a language can mirror generic traitsof a people who uses it. So by it can be reflected not only historical aswell as cultural background of the people in question but also theirgeneral aPproach to life and way of life. Language and culthe arealways locked in interaction. From this is fOllowed that to Anow the onepresuPposes to Anow the otheL So it is comPletely reasonable to assertthat solely linguistic proficiency in a fOreign language can be coamed asonly half baked unless acquisition of such proficiency is ever made inthe perspective of pragmatics. As we surely knoW pragmatics as thebranch of semiotic dealing with the causal and other relations betweenwords, expressions, etc, is inseparable from working of cultUre so far asa language is concemed. Therefore it is only aPpropriate to pronouncethat without an adequate knowledge of the culture of a nation it is verydifficult for a non-native sPeaker of the nation's language to master itperfectly. In the case of leaming the English language, a learner has notonly to leam the language itself but also to make himself familiar withcultures of the English-speaking nations, so that he makes use of theEnglish language, he should be able to understand correctly What is toldhim in Eng1ish and express himself in English correctly andidiomatically. To sum up, leaming a fOreign language calls, in fact, forleaming the culture of the people Who are native speakers of thatlanguage.Culture is a fabric of frozen interpersonal communication, whereasinterpersonal communication is just raw stuff from which culture is tobe transmogrified. So the relationship between communication andculture is much closer than it meets our eyes. Based on our analysis bothof the relationship betwCen language, cornmunication and culture and ofthe fOrmulation process of TEFL methods, we can readily come to theconclusion that cultivating students' communicative competence, Whichis the primary goal of language leaming, is an academic task nowassuming unPrecedefited imPortance. Bllt in China even amil recentlyEnglish teaching in college has been focusing on imparting linguisticknowledge to the neglect of students' communicative compCtence.Nowadays in China majority of the teachers of English have keenly feltthe necessity of leading their students to acquire as much of theknowledge of the cultures of English-speaking nations as possible.I believe I am one axnong the majority specified above. In order togain a clear and concise picture of how things stand with Englishleamers' English socio-cultural ability in colleges in our country anddetect academic flaws in this cormection, I have conducted asocio-cultural questionnaire on college carnpuses and made comparisonsand analyses of statistics thus obtained, in addition to carrying oat aseries of comparative studies of statistics available from such sources as"National College English Test, Band-4". TO some extent, the findingsfrom my researches specified above serve to shed light on the real statevl I IEnglish teaching in our college is now in. Here by "real state" is meamthe grim reality that the scope of knowledge of most of the collegestudents covered by my researches in the domain of culthes of theWestern nations is saddeningly limited.Foreign-language teaching ought to be conducted in conjugation withscholastic endeavor at instilling ifito the students knowledge of cultofe ofthe people using the fOreign language involved in our teachi...