Non-English Major College English Teaching: A Cultural Approach

Foreign language learning is comprised of several components, including grammatical competence, communicative competence, language proficiency, as well as a change in attitudes towards one's own or another culture. For scholars and laymen alike, cultural competence, i.e., the knowledge of the conventions, customs, beliefs, and systems of meaning of a certain country, is indisputably an integral part of foreign language learning. For a nation boasting to have the world's biggest population of learners of English as a foreign language, China has witnessed the development of English teaching theories and practices, especially taking intercultural competence as their goal to incorporate the teaching of culture into the foreign language curriculum.Intercultural competence includes three interrelated levels: target language competence, pragmatic competence and intercultural critical competence, in which pragmatic competence can be further divided into sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence and strategy competence. These levels of competence are to be discussed together with corresponding skills.Traditionally, two main perspectives have influenced the teaching of culture, one pertains to transmission of factual, cultural information which consists in statistical information, that is, institutional structures and other aspects of the target civilization, in other terms, the scope of culture teaching concerned is basically knowledge-focused and has been limited to the literature, history, geography, politics or economy of foreign countries in such courses as "A History of English Literature", "Selected Readings in English Literature". Another perspective lays the emphasis on the learners' communicative competence, cultural consciousness and pedagogical feasibility, teachers are supposed to extend culture teaching from those above to communicative norms, ways of life, value system, customs, habits and folklore of everyday life, so on and so forth. Accordingly, some concrete measures should be taken for the students' sake to embed culture within an interpretive framework and establish connections, namely, between one's own and the target culture as to improve their intercultural competence as well as their linguistic competence.