Context Of Culture And College English Teaching

With the development of opening-up to the outside world, especially after China's entry in the WTO and Beijing's successful bid for Olympic Games of 2008, Chinese people have more and more opportunities to communicate with people from foreign countries. English, as a lingua franca, plays a crucial role. However, Chinese college and university students are facing the problem of developing their communicative competence, which involves the integration of native culture.At present, college English teaching in China still focuses on cultivation of students' fundamental language skills. Although many teachers are aware of the importance of the development of communicative competence, there are still problems in teaching practice, for example, how context of situation and context of culture are integrated into college English teaching practice. Based on the established theories and practices about communicative competence, context, culture and college English teaching, this paper conducts a tentative study of college English teaching under the context of culture, pointing out that the improvement of teaching methods embodies not only the innovation of techniques but also the awareness of cultural education, the development of students' communicative competence. Thus the necessity and importance of cultural education is quite beyond doubt.The author introduces Hymes's theory of communicative competence in chapter two. In light of systemic functional linguistics, which was formulated by M.A.KHalliday, context is constituted by context of situation and context of culture. He defined it as "the social context for the whole language system". Hymes devised his own set of factors to describe the context of situation for the speech event. He lists them under the acronym SPEAKING .In chapter three, the author provides a study of the survey on the current situation of college English learning of non-English majors. The students hope to develop their communicative competence, but their cultural awareness is not to our satisfaction.How can the context of culture be integrated into college English teaching? The author discusses Claire Kramsch's theory of contextual shaping in language teaching and how to integrate the context of culture into language teaching.In chapter five, the author puts forward an assumption of how to integrate the context of culture into college English teaching. Case studies are also given to illustrate the assumption. Then suggestions are put forward on how to develop the students' communicative competence in chapter six.However, problems still exist with this design in practice since theory is one thing and practice is another, it's still difficult to carry out our well-intentioned design. The reasons are manifold: college English classes are too big, normally with no less than 50 students; not all the students are interested in the improved method, being worrying about their test performance. Thus, there is still a lot of work to do to balance the relationship between test and the goal of developing the students' communicative competence.Therefore, the assumption is only a tentative study. Its effectiveness is still open todiscussion. However, the author sincerely hopes it can, to some degree, contribute to college English teaching, to the transition from traditional teacher-centered teaching style to student-centered teaching style, and by way of the tentative discussion, other English teachers will come up with more valuable ideas about college English teaching in China, so our students will benefit.