Developing English Learners' Cultural Competence In China's Environment

The close relationship between language and culture is self-evident. On one hand, language is the carrier and part of culture. On the other, culture poses some restraints on the use of language. In that case, language learning can never be complete without learning its culture. To some degree, it's true that the ultimate goal of teaching a foreign language is to develop the learners' intercultural communicative competence. That's why we need to shift from our conventional way of teaching a foreign language as a language alone to a focus on developing learners' cultural and communicative competence in the related language. There's no doubt that inadequate understanding of cross-cultural differences causes an important handicap for language learners in appropriately using the target language. There's also evidence that students learning the language do not naturally acquire the communicative competence during their process of learning the language. Therefore culture study should become an essential part of language learning.In order to prove the view concerning cultural competence, the author of the current thesis performed this case study. Based on the theoretical review of the relationship between language and culture, the author states the importance of developing learners' intercultural knowledge so as to reduce misunderstanding in communication. A deliberately designed sociocultural test is conducted among a group of English learners in order to find out the status quo of culture teaching in English teaching practice. And an analysis of the test results is presented in this thesis in which the author attempts to explore the causes of the depressing situationof cultural learning practice in English teaching in China. Based on that, strategies are suggested that may promote cultural learning practice in TEFL.