Culture Teaching And Its Significance To College Students' Oral English Proficiency

With China's entering WTO, personnel who have professionalknowledge and are able to communicate with native speakers as well as non-native speakers of English successfully will be in greater and greater need in the society. Therefore, the Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC), particularly oral intercultural communicative competence or oral English proficiency becomes an important criterion that measures the personnel (ICC in the present paper mainly refers to the latter)."Unfortunately, compared with the social needs of personnel, ICC of non-English graduates from the present teaching system is extremely low." (Cao Xia, 2003) Actually, the so-called "extremely low" does not mean that the graduates cannot speak English, but incompetent in real-life communication with native speakers. In the light of its nature, communicative competence is the presentation of the overall quality, so the problem is that mastery of vocabulary and structures does not necessarily ensure a person's communicative competence. The concept of "communicative competence" was first proposed by Dell Hymes in 1971. It not only refers to the ability to apply the grammatical rules of a language in order to form grammatically correct sentences but also ability to know when and where to use these sentences and to whom. It is widely acknowledged by professionals in the field of Foreign Language Teaching that communicative competence no doubt involves "linguistic competence" as well as "pragmatic competence". After more than ten...