An Investigation Into Culturelearning Of English Majors In Local Colleges

"Culture is the context within which we exist, think, feel and relate to others."(Brown, 1980: 122) The use of a language can not be separated from the culture in which it is used. Therefore, foreign language learning will inevitably involve culture learning. And culture teaching plays a very important role in culture learning.In China, the importance of culture teaching in foreign language teaching was recognized more than twenty years ago with the implementation of the open policy. Lots of researches have been done on the teaching objectives, principles, contents, methods etc., and two levels of culture teaching exist: cultural knowledge inputting and cultural understanding training. In one word, culture teaching in China has acquired great achievements. However, this is merely the situation in the key institutes of higher learning, because the researches are mainly done by researchers from these types of universities. As to numerous local colleges it may not be the case, because they hold no advantage in qualified teachers, high quality students or advanced teaching facilities compared with the key institutes of higher learning, and gain no attention from the educational department of the state. However, despite all these disadvantages, the local colleges have the duty of cultivating talents. Therefore, it is necessary to pay due attention to culture teaching in foreign language teaching in these local colleges.With this intention the present author makes an investigation into the present situation of culture learning in three local colleges in Shandong Province by distributing questionnaires to students and making a small-scale interview of students and teachers. The result is dissatisfactory. Students'acquaintance with target culture is unsystematic and insufficient considering they have been English majors for three or four years, though they have realized the importance of cultural elements in foreign...