Incorporating Sociocultural Dimension Into EFL Instruction

Since the 1980s, Chinese EFL teaching community began noticing the importance of sociocultural teaching in EFL instruction. According to the results of previous studies (Wang, 1994; Zhang, 2001; Zhong, Fan & Qin, 2001), sociocultural learning and teaching under Chinese EFL context is far from satisfactory. Their studies target mainly at English majors who have passed TEM-4 or non-English majors who have passed CET-4. Previous research findings indicate EFL learners' sociocultural competence fails to develop side by side with their linguistic competence. This thesis attempts to explore whether sociocultural competence lags behind their linguistic competence among non-English major freshmen as well. If so, what may be the causes for this? And how can this situation be improved? Those are the questions this thesis aims to address.This thesis starts from the discussion of two important categories—culture and communication, and then analyzes the relationship between culture learning and language learning, and that between culture and communication. Then it presents a theoretical construct—sociocultural competence for the whole thesis. Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) holds that the following four components are involved in this construct: social contextual factors, stylistic appropriateness factors, cultural factors, and nonverbal communicative factors. In communication, these components are implicitly or explicitly demonstrated either in verbal or nonverbal behaviors. Based on this theoretical construct, this thesis uses the self-constructed sociocultural competence test to measure non-English major freshmen students' sociocultural competence. The selected three aspects to be tested are verbal behavior, nonverbal behavior and culture knowledge. The results of the test indicate that the subjects' sociocultural competence fails to develop evenly along with their linguistic competence as well. Besides, it is found that students' sociocultural competence of nonverbal behavior lags behind that of their verbal behavior. These findings further provide the evidence that under Chinese EFL context, culture teaching should be carried out all the way from the elementary to the tertiary level. It meanwhile provides the data for the future relevant studies pertinent to culture teaching.Based on the test results, this thesis attempts to analyze the reasons for students' sociocultural competence deficiency. The discussion is conducted from the following perspectives—insufficient culture teaching research, the lack of cultural syllabus in the curriculum, the monotonous teacher roles and teaching techniques, the lack of cultural elements in the teaching materials, and the absence of cultural contents in the English testing. The thesis finally points out that the implementation of culture teaching is a systematic project, so it needs the close cooperation among various aspects involved in EFL pedagogy. Based on the reason analysis, some constructive suggestions are made, and solutions to the problems are put forward.In a word, this thesis conducted a survey on non-English major freshmen students' sociocultural competence based on the theoretical construct—sociocultural competence. Then it analyses the possible reasons why there is cultural deficiency among students. Meanwhile, the corresponding solutions or suggestions are put forward with an aim to better teach or learn English language and culture.