Culture Teaching In Foreign Language Education

Cultural factors have attracted more attention in our foreign language education since the 1980s, which is an outstanding change in foreign language education in China. And since then, culture teaching has always been a hot issue in the field of foreign language education.The author firmly believes that the significance of foreign language and culture teaching lies not only in the good command of foreign language for its instrumental aim — being equipped with communicative skills to survive in modern society, but also in the educational function — helping learners grow in their personality and producing all-round developed persons compatible with the highly developed civilization. In the author's opinion, the foreign language and culture should be viewed as a new world open to learners and be used to encourage learners to grow and develop into complete and integrated persons. In this new world, the clashes and conflicts between learner's native culture and foreign culture are used to create contexts in which learners' cognitive growth and personality development are initiated. Learners who have gained a cognitive growth and a personality development will be competent in their future life. Therefore, the author acknowledges the significance of culture teaching in the foreign language education at the broader educational level.It should be noted that great achievements have been made in theories concerning culture teaching and learning in the past twenty years. However, in spite of the theoretical achievements, practice of culture teaching in English classes of Chinese colleges remains to a certain extent limited. In order to expose some problems existing in the practice of current culture teaching, the author carried out an empirical study among the junior students and the teachers in the university. The empirical study does disclose some existing problems, such as, inadequate teaching materials of home culture, less importance attached to the culture teaching compared with the trainings of the four skills, some teachers' lack of pedagogical training and direct contact with foreign cultures, the low-level of college students' cultural quality,etc.To solve the existing problems, the author put forward some tentative suggestions mainly from three perspectives — the design of culture teaching syllabus, textbook compilation and programs for teacher expertise.