A Study Of Culture Teaching In College English Classes

With the development of new technology, growth in the world's population, and shifts in the global economic arena, international contacts have become more and more significant and frequent. This makes possible and necessary the new interdisciplinary subject intercultural communication. During intercultural communication, we meet from time to time culture shock, culture barriers and culture misunderstanding. Therefore, the importance of culture teaching in foreign language teaching becomes more obvious. The purpose of this dissertation is to show the essence, importance, goals and principles of culture teaching in college English classes and also to provide some techniques and suggestions in culture teaching.Language is the vehicle of culture as well as a means of communication. It is a part of culture and plays a very important role in it. Without language, culture would not be possible. On the other hand, language is influenced and shaped by culture. It reflects culture.Since language and culture are inseparable, foreign language teaching and culture teaching are also inseparable. The essential purpose of language teaching is not only to teach linguistic knowledge but also to teach how to learn communicative competence and cultural competence. At the same time, we can find that the essential purpose of culture teaching in college English class is to strengthen cross-culture awareness, or understanding and cross-culture communicative competence. From this point, we know,the goals of foreign language teaching and culture teaching are similar.Many experts both at home and abroad have talked much about culture teaching, but few treatises systematically deal with culture teaching principles. In this dissertation, the author puts forward and illustrates the four culture teaching principles in foreign language classes. They are: Cognitive Principle, Assimilative Principle, Comparative Principle and Tolerant Principle.Language is a part of culture and at every level of each language can reflect its culture value. At lexical level, from the cultural connotation of certain words and idioms, we can learn different attitudes of English-speakers and Chinese-speakers towards some animals; we can learn some famous events from target culture; we can learn some geographic knowledge and everyday life style from target culture. We also can learn some culturally loaded words in English. At syntactic level, we also can find that particular types of grammatical constructions may be chosen to express particular cultural strategies and assumptions. At the same time we can learn some target culture value from pragmatic level and discourse level, i.e. from language use. During intercultural communication case, we find that grammar mistakes are often easily found and forgiven by native speakers of English in communication, while the improper expression in a certain context because of different pragmatic principles in cross-cultural contact will lead to misunderstanding. So we should pay more attention to pragma-linguistic failures and social-pragmatic failures in college English classes. Through discourse level, we also can find the Chinese prefer the inductive way of thinking. So in English articles written by the Chinese speakers, they do not give direct proof to support the topic but do it in a roundabout way, it makes the native English readers feel puzzled about it.Strategies and techniques of culture teaching in college English classes are a decisive factor, once the principles of culture teaching are determined. Therefore, it is our most important task to work out correct strategies and techniques of culture teaching. According to this dissertation, in English classes, teachers had better adopt two ways to organize culture teaching. One is to provide cultural information resources, such as culture islands, culture capsules, culture assimilators and culture aside; the other is to organize cultural activities, such as festival celebration, audio-motor units, mini-dramas, video films or English teaching films, lectu...