A Case Study Of Language And Culture Teaching In A Chinese University

Since the early 1980s, the importance of culture in foreign language teaching has been recognized by scholars and educators both from China and abroad. As a result, culture teaching has always been a hot issue in foreign language teaching field. The goal of foreign language teaching has shifted its emphasis from "Linguistic Competence" to "Communicative Competence", and further to "Intercultural Communicative Competence". The cultivation of Intercultural Communicative Competence highlights the input of culture knowledge of target language, and the integration of language and culture teaching. Nowadays, English has already become an international language; its speakers are composed of not only native speakers such as Americans and British, but also people of former British colonial countries and people from many other countries. Under this circumstance, culture teaching in foreign language education should not be limited to the cultures of native-speakers.To investigate the current culture teaching in Chinese EFL classrooms, the author carried out a case study of culture and language teaching in Donghua University. With the help of some research methods such as questionnaires, classroom observations, teacher interviews and textbook evaluation, the author makes a detailed analysis of present culture teaching in a Chinese university. She tries to gain a deeper understanding of the teachers' perceptions of developing their students' intercultural awareness and their teaching practice with the help of the questionnaire, interview and classroom observation. The researcher of this essay also critically examines the English textbook currently used in the school and makes comments on its strengths and weaknesses. The research indicates some problems in language and culture teaching practice and shows that the textbooks adopted by the university mainly focus on the teaching of language and target culture while culture of non-native English speaking countries is ignored. Considering the fact that English is a global language and culture is closely related to language, the author draws the readers' attention to the problems and concludes that teacher's attitude towards culture teaching in language classrooms, textbook compilation, and university syllabus design may contribute to these problems. To solve the problems, the author makes some tentative suggestions: providing special training seminar to language teachers, improving university teaching syllabus and re-arranging the culture content during the textbook compilations so as to improve culture teaching in Chinese EFL classrooms.