Reflections And Suggestions On Culture Teaching In China's English Education

In the past half century, there has been a strong commitment to including culture in the language curriculum. Issues around this commitment abound, concerning the relationship between language and culture, foreign language acquisition and foreign cultural understanding. Although most of foreign language teachers have already recognized the importance of inclusion of the host culture in language curriculum and the impossibility of a foreign language acquisition without the relevant cultural understanding, the study of these issues remain superficial and rarely achieve any substantial progress. Since the opening up of China in 1980s, similar situation has occurred. Scholars and practitioners in foreign language teaching began to reflect on these issues and have reached a consensus that inclusion of culture teaching in language curriculum should be a must.Culture has gained a much prominent position in foreign language teaching field. On the one hand, many wrote articles to present their views on the importance of culture teaching and the principles and methods to carry out culture teaching. Some even put forward some constructive suggestions. On the other hand, culture is officially recognized as an important part of language curriculum, as the Syllabus for the English Majors in the Institutions of Higher Learning (2000) prescribes in the fourth teaching principle: special attention should be paid to fostering the students' cross-cultural communicative competence, which includes not only the ability to use the form of the English language properly but also the sensitivity and tolerance towards cultural differences as well as the ability to deal with the flexibility of cultural differences. Apart from these efforts. English teachers have also done their utmost to impart to their students as much cultural knowledge of the target language as possible. Nevertheless, in China there are obviously still a lot of problems yet to be solved in English culture teaching. For example, (1) understanding of the relationship between culture and foreign language teaching is still relatively unsatisfactory in extent and profundity; (2) it is still problematic about when and how to introduce English culture into the language teaching and about what specific cultural contents should be introduced; (3) scarcity of authoritative, systematic and scientific materials about contrastive analysis between English and Chinese, and irrationality of the Englishtextbook design have become, to a certain extent, barriers to the development of the English culture teaching. This paper is going to deal with the above-mentioned issues, and try to come up with some tentative proposals and suggestions.This paper is divided into eight parts inclusive of the introduction and conclusion.The introduction mainly explains the reasons and aims of my writing this paper.Chapter 1 gives a brief account of the definition of culture and people's different opinions on the relationship between language and culture. These opinions generally can be categorized as: linguistic determinism, cultural determinism and the interdependence and theory of interactive relation between language and culture.Chapter 2 touches briefly upon the development of the foreign culture teaching both at home and abroad.Chapter 3 Three makes a further explanation of the close relationship between culture and foreign language teaching in terms of transfer theory and schemata theory, hence putting culture teaching in an indispensable position in foreign language teaching.Chapter 4 makes a careful analysis of such problems as when and how to introduce English culture into the language teaching, what specific cultural content should be introduced. It also attempts some correspondent solutions.In Chapter 5. the writer argues that the keys to solving the problems how to teach English culture and what specific content should be selected, and improving the students' cross-cultural awareness and cross-cultural communicative competence are building up the English cultural syllabus, reforming English textbook...