Cultivation Of Intercultural Awareness In College English Teaching

With the globalization of the world economy and the popularization of international exchange,the world is becoming a "global village",where people with different colours of skin,using different languages and from different countries as well as different cultural backgrounds are living together just like the "global villagers".China is in desperate need of people who are familiar with.foreign cultures and capable of communicating accurately and appropriately in intercultural situations.This is a new challenge in College English teaching.Intercultural communication requires two types of competence,namely, linguistic competence and socio-cultural competence,which lead to changes in the goals, objectives,methods,strategies of foreign language teaching accordingly.However,in practice we realize that students often have lots of disagreements,misunderstanding,and even culture shocks when they communicate with the native speakers of English.Those breakdowns and misunderstandings are due to the lack of cultural knowledge of the country whose language is being learned.Students need to enhance their intercultural communicative competence.The author thinks that integrating culture teaching into College English teaching,cultivating students' intercultural,awareness,and developing their intercultural communicative competence,are the key factors leading to successful intercultural communication. It is generally accepted that one of the goals of College English teaching is to cultivate students' intercultural communicative competence.To achieve this goal,students are required to increase their cultural knowledge and improve their intercultural awareness. However students' knowledge of English culture is not systematic and sufficient to cope with the problems they have when they interact with native speakers of English.They often have various pragmatic failures in communication.It is the author's belief that cultivating College English students' intercultural awareness through establishing a conceptual framework of culture teaching and learning is more effective and practical than through isolated classroom instruction.Thus,the conceptual framework of cultivating College English students' intercultural awareness is raised and illustrated in detail with respect to the goal,principle,content of culture teaching.The author proposes different methods for cultivating College English students' intercultural awareness in accordance with features of two aspects of teaching and learning, namely at curricular and extracurricular time.The study focuses on the cultivation of students' intercultural awareness in CET and aims at explaining how to effectively promote the target culture learning in the context of Chinese learners of English through the conceptual framework of cultivating students' intercultural awareness.However,there are still some limitations in this study.It remains open to be discussed and improved.