Cultural Context In Teaching College English

English, as a lingua franca, plays a vital role in the international communication. Chinese people have more and more opportunities to communicate with people from foreign countries, especially after China's entry into WTO and Beijing's successful bidding for Olympic Games of 2008. However, present college English teaching in China still focuses on the cultivation of students'fundamental language skills, and Chinese university students at the same time have eager desire to develop their communicative competence.The development of communicative competence involves the integration of target culture. This thesis conducts a tentative study of college English teaching under the context of culture, pointing out that the improvement of teaching methods embodies not only the innovation of techniques but also the development of students'communicative competence and the awareness of cultural education.The author introduces Hymes's theory of communicative competence, Claire Kramsch's theory of contextual shaping in language teaching and the relationship between language and culture. In light of systemic functional linguistics, context is constituted by context of situation and context of culture. Context of culture is the social context for the whole language system, and context of situation is the embodiment of context of culture. On the basis of these theories, this thesis stresses that present college English teaching in China be communication-aimed, and culture be a valuable component of the foreign-language program. Lack of cultural knowledge may prevent good language learners from improving their communicative competence further and making sense of the world around them. In this thesis the author attempts to show how we develop students'communicative competence through student-centered teaching style and what we can do to raise students'awareness of cultural...