A Cognitive Approach To Main Cultural Factors In Foreign Language Teaching

This thesis presents a cognitive analysis of the main cultural factors in foreign language teaching, especially focusing upon the contribution and incorporation of culture teaching into college English class.Foreign language learning consists of several key components, including grammatical competence, communicative competence, language proficiency as well as cultural competence. For the last few decades, cultural competence has been indisputably an integral part of foreign language learning, and many foreign language teachers have considered it as their goal to incorporate the teaching of culture into the foreign language curriculum. And many sociolinguists maintain that foreign language learning is foreign culture learning. What is debatable, however, is that: what does the term culture mean and how can it be incorporated into language teaching. As observed by Kramsch (1993), culture in language learning is not an expendable fifth skill. It is always in the background, challenging learners'communicative competence to make sense of the world around them.Culture teaching is not merely the transmission of the information concerning people in the target culture and to learn a foreign language is not just to learn to communicate. According to Kramsch (1993), to learn a foreign language is not merely to learn how to communicate but also to discover how much leeway the target language allows learners to manipulate grammatical forms, sounds, and meanings, and to reflect upon, or even flout, socially accepted norms at work both in their own or the target culture.As is shown by the sociocultural test of the target culture conducted by the author, our learners'cultural competence is far behind their language competence, and consequently this poor cultural competence has negative transfer on learners'acquisition of the foreign language. Negative transfer in intercultural communication is manifest in forms of stereotypes, prejudice, cultural shock, etc. What's more, it can be inferred from the research that there is no correlation between learners'language competence and cultural competence; therefore students who are competent in language skills are not necessarily qualified for intercultural communication. Cultivation of learners'cultural competence is of vital importance in language teaching classrooms.A historical review of the existing options on how to teach target culture in China and Western countries reveals that there is no all-inclusive or perfect solution to culture teaching. We Chinese people have learned at our expense that either isolating China by closing the door or blindly absorbing foreign culture will do great harm to the development of China. Colorful selection may serve as a wise option for assimilating the target culture.To improve culture teaching in foreign language classrooms, several proposals are suggested, such as, creating authentic environment and using authentic materials, introducing cultural background knowledge, cultivating empathy, developing cultural problem solving ability, etc. Needless to say, foreign language teachers also play a vital role in promoting culture teaching. They should be qualified not only as foreign language teachers, but as foreign culture teachers. They need to have the ability to analyze both home and target cultures competently and serve as the"mediators of culture teaching"(Singhal 1998).In order that students improve cultural competence, culture teaching should follow some clear-cut principles, whereby the teaching objective may be achieved successfully, which include Cognitive Principle, Relevant Principle, Assimilative Principle and Comprehensible Principle. Those principles can function as useful guidelines for culture teaching, though they are far from complete. Teachers should apply the principles accordingly and flexibly, depending on different learners or situations.Studies of culture teaching only have a short history compared with linguistic research. However systematic research in this field is expanding rapidly. Based upon some existing theories discussed in this paper, the author herself has done some research concerning cultural factors in college English teaching. Due to the small sample size and time limitation, the results yielded from this study can only serve as hypotheses to be further tested in the future. Some of the proposals or advice still remains at theoretical level, just because of current teaching arrangement and limited teaching environment. However, I sincerely hope this thesis will contribute to culture teaching in our college English class, to a lesser or greater extent.