An Explorative Study Of Culture Teaching Model In College English Teaching

In recent years, many researchers have been advocating culture teaching in the College English teaching, but the current situations of culture teaching in CET is not satisfying which is in an unsystematic and unsubstantial state; many teachers more or less incorporate some cultures into CET, but students get little from teachers; although many students have passed CET-4 and CET-6, their intercultural communicative competence can not make the companies satisfied.The present study focuses on the exploration of an effective teaching model to optimize the quality of culture teaching, to arouse students' interest in learning English, to improve students' cultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence. So first, the thesis has made a deep study and analysis on the current situations of culture teaching in CET. 400 non-English majors from four universities of Zhejiang province have done the questionnaires among which 392 pieces are valid; 20 English teachers from Zhejiang Gongshang University have been interviewed and their classes have been observed. After careful analysis on results of questionnaires and interview, it can be concluded that most of teachers and students have already realized the importance and necessity of culture teaching, but in the culture teaching, some problems still do exist. One of the factors which can influence culture teaching is the ineffective culture teaching model which has tumed some students off. For this reason, this thesis tries to combine the theory of Constructivism, exploring a new culture teaching model in CET, in order to improve the students' interest in learning English and culture. Absorbed the essence of Constructivism, a new model----CIRCULAR model has been constructed. The central core of the model is to emphasize the leamer-centeredness, requires students to construct new knowledge initiatively in the form of cooperation and interaction in the small unit with the aim of communication, which will make students not only grasp English knowledge and communicative skills, but also build up a corresponding system of cultural knowledge. This thesis tries to analyze the validity of this model from the perspective of the theory, but in order to test whether this model is effective or not, an experiment has been done. Two classes of non-English majors are involved in the experiment: one as the Experimental group instructed with CIRCULAR model; the other as the Control group taught with the traditional fact-based teaching model. Both Sociocultural pre-test and post-test are conducted in the two groups. After three months' experiment, SPSS 11.5 is used to do the statistical analysis. According to the results, scores and performance of students from the Experimental group are obviously better than that in the Control group. It indicates that CIRCULAR model is effective and applicable in CET, and it also proves that culture teaching can improve students' interest in learning English. Therefore, this study has theoretical significance and pedagogical implication.