Kramsch's Perspective Of Cultural Diversity Interaction And Culture Teaching In Chinese Foreign Language Education

Since the 1980s the influence of cultural elements upon foreign language education has been revealed. With the increasing need of cross-cultural contacts in the 1990s, researchers paid more attention to the importance of the teaching of culture. The traditional structural foreign language teaching emphasizing vocabulary and grammar is no longer able to meet the demand of cross-cultural exchanges. Researchers have shared the view that cultural elements ought to be included in foreign language education; however, they have agreed neither on the objective of culture teaching nor on how to integrate cultural elements with the teaching of linguistic forms.After making a brief review about the teaching of culture in western and Chinese history the author has found out several directions upon the issue of treating cultural elements. The first direction is to treat culture teaching as the learners' accumulation of cultural background knowledge, the second one is to regard culture teaching as the learners' imitation of appropriate target cultural behaviors, and the third one is to consider culture teaching as the way to remedy cultural conflicts in cross-cultural communication. Unanimously, those directions cast the eyes on the target culture, which seems to exist objectively and neutrally.Claire Kramsch, who is currently Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has pointed out the diversity of culture. Bearing in mind the complexity of cultural phenomena, the existence of various subcultures, and the uniqueness of individuals even in the same group, Kramsch believes that an objective target culture does not exist at all. Everyone sees people from other cultures from the perspective of his own culture; as a result, cultural conflicts are unavoidable in cross-cultural contacts. She has proposed an idea of double-directional interaction, in which cultural conflicts can be reconciled through shaping new meanings to reach intercultural understanding. In this process both sides of the communication have changed, ascompared to their original ideas, but it's not the case in which one side moves towards the other while the other side keeps unchanged.It's helpful to look at the teaching of culture in the foreign language education in China with Kramsch's perspective. This dissertation has reconsidered the position, goal, and focus of culture teaching in China, and has put forward several proposals. Firstly, culture teaching ought to be integrated with the training of the four basic skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing, instead of being a fifth skill equal to the four. Secondly, culture teaching ought to aim at training culturally double-directional learners who know about both their native culture and the target one, instead of training totally native-like behavior imitators who cast their eyes solely on the target culture. Thirdly, culture teaching does not simply mean learners' accumulation of cultural knowledge or imitation of appropriate cultural behaviors but, based on the combination of the two, train learners to shape their own meanings from the context of interactions and to take a 'third place' beyond both the home culture and the target one. In pedagogical practice foreign language teachers need to help students to set up the notion of double-directional culture, in order not to pay all attention to the target culture and to keep open-minded enough to reach the ultimate goal of culturally double-directional learners.