Critical Cultural Education In English As A Foreign Language Teaching

A foreign language learner's understanding of a second culture is fundamentally affected by his or her culturally defined view of the world, beliefs, and presuppositions. These beliefs and presuppositions have important pedagogical implications and need to be considered in foreign language teaching and learning reality. Applied linguists and language teachers have become increasingly aware that a foreign language can rarely be learned or taught without addressing the culture of the community in which it is spoken.Teaching target culture in EFL is a perplexing issue in many countries, yet it is a matter that cannot be overlooked. A language is taught or learned in a one-sided manner if its associated culture is neglected or left to accidental happenings in or outside the classroom context. EFL education makes a relatively minor contribution to the general curriculum unless it is culturally illuminating.Approaches to teaching target culture have been improving. The conventional approach is to add explicit cultural studies to EFL programs. This approach is basically knowledge-focused. An alternative approach to teaching target culture, derived from the communicative approach to language teaching, is to integrate the teaching of language and culture by focusing on language in use. The third approach gets some implications from cross-cultural studies, emphasizing the importance of critical awareness of both source and target culture in order to get message across. A lack of cross-cultural awareness can be a severe hindrance in the understanding of massage that is linguistically accurate or comprehensible.With these points in mind, we, firstly, attempt to make it clear the definition of culture in chapter two, and propose a notion consisting of three parameters for doing research on critical cultural awareness. Then, we sum up and describe two small-scale questionnaires concerning language teaching and learning respectively, which is elaborated in chapter three. And the results derived from focusing on ideological aspects reveal much about the present state of foreign language teaching and learning status in colleges and universities. Major findingsindicate that a great discrepancy exists between syllabus and course book, course book and testing. The results are: (1) more than half of the teachers and the students think that they only attach great importance to the practice of the target language skills and constantly put aside some activities that might be added to the whole language teaching and learning program (teachers' choice: 56.4%; students' choice: 51.7%); (2) the proportion of the ideological contents in the course books New Horizon College English only amounts to 36.3%; In the course book College English, it amounts to 37.5%; (3) in the past four years' College English Test Band-4 there is an average proportion of 19.25% which deals with the ideology. So, we might conclude that the contents both in the course books and the tests are not well proportioned. They need to be supplemented and moderately assessed. In view of this, it is advisable to exert much effort in consideration of the cultural elements in the English teaching program, so as to bridge the gaps within the teaching domain.In chapter four, the paper also develops some paradigms for cultural teaching and learning. Suggestions are made for course book designers in terms of a negotiated syllabus. Methodological significances are projected by emphasizing a flexible, creative, and balanced approach to language teaching and learning. Students should be abundantly trained to raise their ability of learning to learn from a cultural perspective.While discussing the limitation of the study, we also look for future research so as to draw more attention to the field of critical cultural awareness study.