The Cultural Differences And The Cultivation Of Cross-Cultural-Awareness In English Study Of College Students

During the English teaching in university, we find more and more problems around the cultural awareness have appeared and puzzled students.For a long time, since the influence of the traditional approaches, English learning only takes note of the cultivation of linguistic competence, meanwhile disregards that of communicative competence.Thus the languages used in commuication maybe faultless, the same words or expressions may not mean the same things to different people. The reason for such different reactions is that each is interpreting what the other says according to his or her own customs.habits or culture,and doesn't care that inside languages esixts lots of differences.which is called here-cultural differences.Culture consists of all the shared products of human society, including things such as ideas, customs, languages etc. Language is a part of culture and plays 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. In the broadest sense, language is the symbolic representation of a people ,and it comprises their historical and cultural back-ground as well as their approaches to life and their ways of living and thinking.Cultures differ from one another, and each culture is unique. As cultures are diverse, languages are diverse too. It is only natural then that with differences in cultures and differences in languages, difficulties often arise in communicating between different people. So learning English well means more than merely mastering the pronunciations grammars words and idioms.When a native speaker learns his or her own language, he or she naturally acquires its culture. Because of the lack of the real, natural language contest, when English is studied in colleges, our students can not naturally acquire its culture .This is the reason why the author here has made a study on the cultural-awareness of the university students in the study of English and its cultivation.In this thesis, by exploring the historical devlopment of the studies of cultural differences in the west and China, analyzing the college students, defining the conception of the cultural-awareness, the author makes thinking about presenting a design of the approach of English study in universities with the combination to both the developing ofthe linguistic competence and the cultivating of the cultural-awareness,only in this way would the communicative competence be obtained in universities in China. The thesis is divided into four parts:1 .The comparison and the analysis on the cultural differences in study of foreign languages in both the west and China.2.The influential elements of the cultural differences upon the study of English for college students as well as a lot of examples.3.The definition of the conception of the cultural awareness and its function,and a design of the approach of English study in universities.4.The cultivation of the cultural-awareness of the college students and some suggestion on it pointed with practice,including its psychological readiness,contents and levels,basic stages,general principles and methods.