Solutions To Problems On English-Majors' Cultural Teaching In China's Higher Education

Influnenced by Traditional Linguistics, Structural Linguistics and Transition-Generation Grammar, English teaching in China's higher education has put great stress on the instruction of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar of the language for long time. Oriented by the language skill training, classroom instructions are overwhelmed by rigid pattern drills and grammar points. As a result, English-majors are much less able to communicate in English, though taking good command of English knowledge on vovabulary and grammar. In recent years, with the further development of Intercultural Communication, English teachers in China have reached an agreement that the objective of English teaching is not only to promote the student's ability of listening, speaking, reading and writing, but, what is more important, to help students develop their cultural competence. In a sense, foreign language study is the study of cultures and foreign language teaching is cultural teaching.Emphasis on cultural teaching has become a strong trend in English teaching community.But the study and practice in cultural teaching has not been long, we still have quite a lot of problems in this acdemic field, such as"what does culture teaching actually cover? What are the principles to follow? How to make cultural teaching program? What teaching material to choose? How to examine the cultural competence of English majors? etc."In short, the issue of how to facilitate cultural teaching for English majors to enhance their ability of intercultural communication has become an important subject facing us.This thesis makes a deep and comprehensive study of those problems mentioned previously in university English cultural teaching for English majors in terms of languge-culture relations, intercultural communication, cultural linguistics and pragmatics. On the basis of what have been achieved by some famous linguists in this acdemic field and with the help of the rich experience in English teaching, the writer offers a solution to the existing problems in cultural teaching.