The Teaching Of Culture In An EFL College English Class

This thesis is concerned with the contribution and incorporation of the teaching of culture into the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. More specifically, some consideration will be given to the why and how of culture teaching. It will be demonstrated that teaching a foreign language is not tantamount to giving a homily on syntactic structures or learning new words and expressions, but mainly incorporates, or should incorporate, some cultural elements, which are intertwined with language itself. Furthermore, an attempt will be made to incorporate culture into the classroom by means of considering some techniques and methods currently used. The main premise of the paper is that effective communication is more than a matter of language proficiency and that, apart from enhancing and enriching communicative competence, cultural competence can also lead to empathy and respect toward different cultures as well as promote objectivity and cultural perspicacity. In this dissertation, the author reviews theories about culture teaching and learning and this thesis is an attempt to find out how to teach culture in English classroom so that Chinese college students can communicate in English with people from different cultures, especially western cultures, more effectively. It is universally accepted that foreign language learning is composed of the following components: grammatical competence, communicative competence, language proficiency, and the attitudes towards one's native and other cultures. Nowadays, educators from home and abroad believe that learning a foreign language means learning a great deal concerning foreign civilization and culture. In the process of foreign language learning, Chinese college students have to get involved mainly in two cultures—western and eastern, or more exactly speaking, the cultures based on both English and Chinese background. There are distinct differences between the two cultures, which make great influence on students' learning process, even leading to many obstacles in relation with culture. Chinese students should learn and accept the differences between English and Chinese cultures in order to improve their communicative skills. Cultural differences have not been paid adequate attention to in China before; consequently, this is one of the main reasons for low communicative English proficiency level of Chinese college students. Taking cultural differences into consideration, they will be able to communicate far better in English with English native speakers.The utmost goal of foreign language teaching is to train students' communicative ability, that is to say, to help them master one foreign language as acommunicative tool, but not merely the language knowledge. Hence, in order to improve learner's English proficiency, it is an effective way to combine English teaching with cultural studies. Based on precedent research done in the field of linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology and pragmatics, together with the analysis of EFL students' cultural errors in their learning process, the author of this thesis explores the following issues: a) the close relation between language and culture; b) cultural differences and language teaching; c) the relationship between language teaching and cultural studies; d) analysis and countermeasures towards students' social-pragmatic failures; e) teachers' role in cross-culture language teaching; f) reforming steps and corresponding evaluation on EFL class teaching.It is obvious that those errors concerning culture made by college students result from lacking cultural background knowledge in their learning English. Having analyzed those errors, the author puts forward the culture-inputting pattern and also illustrates how to input cultural elements into EFL college classroom to promote students' cultural awareness, utilizing some authentic materials out of the author's own teaching practice.This inputting pattern referred to in this thesis differs greatly from the traditional teaching pattern, which is on the teacher-...