On Culture Introduction Into English Teaching In Vocational Colleges

Vocational education is an important component of higher education in our country. The aim for vocational English teaching is to cultivate the students' communicative competence for business affairs. Communicative competence and culture are inseparable. Successful intercultural communication is more than verbal exchange, it involves cultural factors. Therefore, it is very important for Chinese teachers to regard cultural introduction as an essential part of their work so as to help the students more easily and better understand the language they are learning and use the language appropriately for intercultural communication.However, the newly revised syllabus does not deal with the culture introduction or the development of cultural awareness in college English teaching directly. The traditional grammar-translation method has been dominating in vocational English classroom and culture teaching has been ignored. This is the initial incentive to the writing of this thesis.We hold that culture introduction should be carried out properly throughout English teaching in vocational English classroom. The author tries to discuss this topic in four chapters.In Chapter One, the author analyzes the teaching features, teaching goals and the current situations in vocational education. The author holds the humble view that it is urgent for teachers to introduce culture in society in EFL (English as a foreign language) classroom to meet the need of the modern society in the knowledge-based economy in China. It is believed that the mission of foreign languages teaching is to cultivate the qualified talents who can fulfill the task of communicating with other people from different cultural backgrounds successfully. Both languageand culture should be reconciled with each other in teaching.In Chapter Two, the author proposes principles and purposes of the introduction of culture into the teaching of English in vocational education. The goal of foreign language teaching is to cultivate students' ability to study and master English as a communicative tool. The author proposes that the goal of culture introduction should accord with the goal of English teaching and the training objectives at vocational colleges. The goal of culture introduction at vocational colleges includes five levels: Cultural information teaching, fostering cultural awareness, culture-based understanding, cultivating students' communicative competence and comprehensive ability as well as the ability to acquire cultural information in learning. Meanwhile, teachers should follow four principles: practicability, progressiveness, appropriateness, and mainstream culture.Chapter Three deals with survey conducted on the content of culture introduction into the teaching of English, including culture and vocabulary;culture and grammar;customs and culture. The author is of the opinion that vocabulary is the most culturally loaded one and culture is first reflected in vocabulary. Sentence structures are restrained by thinking modes and thinking modes reveal the value system of a nation. We can find that particular types of grammatical constructions may be chosen to expression particular cultural strategies and assumptions. Customs are influenced and shaped by the beliefs and values of people in the culture.The last chapter discusses the approaches to introducing culture to English teaching. How to carry out effective cultural introduction in the process of teaching language knowledge is an urgent task facing vocational English teaching. The author suggests adopting different methods to breed students' socio-cultural ability in class and out of class.In the classroom activities, the teacher should make full use of the current teaching materials and change the mode of the traditional teacher-centered classroom and provide cultural introduction through linguistic knowledge instruction and language skills training. The teacher may introduce culture in various methods such as contractive analysis, role-play, multi-media and so on. At the same time, all kinds of extracurricular activities can be designed to help students to improve their cultural awareness.The differences between Chinese and Western cultures bring troubles to English study as a foreign language. Only when English learners gain access to and master the related cultural information, can they be a quick-and-effective English learner. The fulfillment of this goal requires that the teachers themselves should improve their cultural awareness and cross-cultural communicative competence. The role of the teacher is not only to impart knowledge of English, but to introduce the Western culture to students as well.