Culture Teaching In College English And A Schema-based Approach

This paper begins with the standing jest "where, where" to support the idea that teaching language must conclude teaching culture, because it has been found that the students' problems in English comprehension exhibit mainly in two aspects: one is that they know the meaning of the reading materials but don't know why; another is that the students don't understand at all. Both problems are due to their lack of the correspondent cultural background knowledge.By making a survey through a questionnaire, the writer finds it a necessity to introduce students culture while teaching language. The general run of students are poor at pragmatic ability and cross-cultural awareness just because they get less cultural information and they understand the texts from the angle of their own psychological cultural acceptance without noticing the cultural difference.According to schema theory, background knowledge plays an important role in understanding the texts. The theory stresses the links between the new information and the preexisted knowledge. The writer believes if a teacher inputs more cultural background knowledge to the students, it will help the students better understand the reading materials.The thesis moves from theory to practice and last gets the conclusion that the quoted joke should definitely be avoided if students possess adequate cultural background knowledge and cross-cultural awareness.