The Cultural Nature Of Language And The Cultural Functions Of Language In Communication

This paper discusses the importance of cultural awareness in the process of learning a foreign language, the idea that learning language is learning culture and puts forward a set of principles for cultural input. It aims for different levels of cultural input to achieve cross-cultural understanding - awareness of their own culture as well as that of the target language. A series of activities are systematically designed to develop the students' cultural awareness, make the study of culture an integral part of every lesson and the structured practices a means of transforming students' cultural competence into cultural performance. The objective existence of cultural differences between Chinese and English has made it very significant to introduce the culture of the target language culture to language teaching. Identifying the connotations of "culture", understanding the importance of cultural introduction at different structural levels of second or foreign language teaching with a good command of the basic techniques will be of great help to the organic, effective combination of language teaching and cultural acquisition. The necessity and importance of cultural education is quite beyond doubt, but it should not be simply viewed as the cultural introduction of the target language. The cultural education of mother tongue should not be neglected. The integration of foreign culture and native culture can be accomplished through to various approaches and strategies. Many studies on intercultural communication...