Incorporating Chinese Culture Into College English Teaching In China

It has been commonly accepted that culture teaching should be laid emphasis on in the process of language teaching. In china, culture teaching has been receiving more and more attention from a large number of scholars and foreign language teachers. However, the achievement of culture teaching can only be seen in the teaching of target culture, with the English learners' native culture totally ignored. This leads to students' poor expressiveness of Chinese culture and, on the other hand, it impedes the cultivation of students' intercultural communicative competence. Since intercultural communication is a kind of two-way activity and this feature determines that native culture should be included in the culture teaching in EFL. It is evident that English learning does not simply aim at learning about western culture, it also aims at having a better understanding of Chinese culture and transmitting it with English to the world. Now it has been a hot issue in the filed of English language teaching about how to develop students' ability to express Chinese culture in English as well as linguistic competence and abundant western cultural knowledge, so as to realize effective intercultural communication.Based on the results and analysis of questionnaire and test, the author makes an investigation into the existing problem in the current situation of culture teaching in college and stresses the necessity of home culture teaching in EFL. In the meantime, the author carries out some teaching experiments to explore how to realize the integration of western culture and Chinese culture in the college English teaching.The thesis firstly introduces the relevant theoretical background. An extensive literature review of relevant concepts and ideas and research findings are presented from an intercultural communication perspective to lay a theoretical foundation for the rest of the thesis. Building on that, the thesis then gives an account of the current situation of culture teaching in relation to foreign language teaching in China by highlighting some facts and research findings. Then the significance of cultivating English learners' expressiveness of Chinese culture in English is elaborated. Chapter three is an Empirical study. Using questionnaire, the author carries out a survey of the current situation of culture teaching in non-English majors' classroom in a college in Zhejiang province. The result of survey shows that students' mastery of Chinese culture as well as ability to present it in English is far from satisfaction; the reasons resulting in this are deeply analyzed. Then the author conducts teaching experiments of integrating Chinese culture into college English teaching and success has been achieved. The experiments conclude that the integration of Chinese culture into college English teaching can not only promote the development of students' linguistic competence, but also greatly cultivates the students' intercultural competence. The conclusion gives a summary of the whole thesis, points out the limitations of the thesis and recommends further study.