A Cultural Appraoch To The Teaching Of College English

The ultimate goal of TEFL is not only to improve learner's linguistic competence but also his communicative competence. Therefore culture should be included in language teaching. However, culture teaching has long been ignored in China's TEFL practice. As a result, learner's communicative competence was not adequately developed. With the development and introduction of CLT (Communicative Language Teaching), more and more researchers and teachers began to attach importance to culture teaching.Based on the theoretical framework of CLT, this thesis aims to provide some practical approaches to carry out cultural instruction in TEFL pratice with New College English as the teaching material. The whole thesis falls into six parts:Chapter 1 states that the aim of the thesis is to provide some practical approaches to improve learner's communicative competence through cultural instruction in TEFL practice. The general layout of the thesis is also presented in this part.Chapter 2 gives a brief overview to the former research in the field of cultural instruction.Chapter 3 analyzes the necessity and the significance of cultural instruction in China's TEFL practice from two aspects, the present situation in China's TEFL practice, and miscommunication in intercultural communication and its implication.Chapter 4 provides the theoretical basis for the whole thesis by examining the close relation between language, culture and communication. Then the goals and principles of cultural instruction are discussed.Chapter 5 is a case analysis of cultural instruction in TEFL practice. In this chapter cultural instruction with New College English can be presented from three stages: preparatory stage, receptive stage, and productive stage. The preparation serves as a kind of warm-up activity, which stimulates and attracts students' interest ina certain theme presented in each unit. And teachers can make best use of this activity by providing learners with background information to facilitate the teaching process. Cultural instruction at the second stage involves four contrastive aspects: different cultural connotation at lexical level, different backgrounds at idiomatic system level, different grammatical usage at syntactic level and different styles at discourse level. The productive stage is a kind of follow-up work carried out in two steps: in-class speaking and after-class writing. Cultural instruction at this stage mainly involves the contrastive analysis of thought patterns and rhetoric. With all these stages completed, there is an evaluation of the teaching. And the major findings are listed.Based on the above chapters, the last part offers the conclusion that cultural instruction greatly improves non-English-major students' communicative competence by raising their cultural awareness. Thus learning a language is inseparable from learning its culture. And cultural competence is an integral part of communicative competence. In order to integrate culture teaching with language teaching, the best approach is to carry out cultural instruction at three stages: stage of preparation, receptive stage and productive stage. This approach has been proved feasible and successful in practical classroom teaching. Meanwhile the present author has collected a lot of firsthand data, and has helped students improve their intercultural communicative competence.