A Study On The Correlation Between Cultural Teaching And Students' Communicative Competence

With the development of modern technology and the fast steps of economical globalization, people from different countries, regions and cultures have contacted more and more frequently. Communication and cooperation among people from different cultural backgrounds are increasing. To strengthen the cooperation, eliminate possible misunderstanding and lessen communication barriers or even conflicts, therefore, language education is expected to contribute not only to the understanding of languages, but also the target cultures and to the practical communicative ability in intercultural communication settings.Since the 1950s, the trend of research in foreign language learning has been shifted from the exploration of developing sole linguistic skills of students to the cultivation of their intercultural communicative competence. Nowadays, culture has been regarded as an inseparable part of foreign language teaching and learning and it is necessary for students to obtain such a competence by culture teaching. Research on the ways to motivate students to use language appropriately and to conduct effective intercultural communication constitutes an important inquiry in current foreign language teaching. With the development of economy in China and China's frequent contact with other countries, it is imperative to train effective intercultural communicators. However, non-English majors' communicative competence is far from perfect. The paper aims to explore the relationship between students' communicative competence and their knowledge of the target culture. Specifically it aims to explore whether culture instruction helps improve students' cultural awareness and whether their cultural awareness helps enhance their communicative competence.The quantitative and the qualitative studies are adopted in this experiment. Sixty sophomores majoring respectively in Agriculture and Chinese Literature at Guizhou University are selected for the quantitative study. The experiment lasts for 12 weeks. Of the two classes, one is the experiment group (EG) with 30 subjects from College of Agriculture, while the other is the control group (CG) with 30 subjects from College of Humanities. In EG, the researcher employs cultural teaching along with the normal teaching schedule while there is no planned culture instruction employed but the normal teaching schedule in CG. Subjects in EG and CG take the pre-test and post-test. The researcher interviews six students in EG after post-test. They are asked questions about their opinions and attitude towards culture and communicative competence.The results of the pre-test indicate that there is no significant difference that exists between the CG and EG before the treatment, namely, the subjects' performances are at the similar level. The results of the post-test indicates great significant difference found between CG and EG, namely, we can see that the Experiment Group performs better than the Control Group. At the same time, many good ideas and suggestions are collected from the six interviewees.According to the results of quantitative study, we find that cultural instruction in EFL classes can help enhance the subjects' cultural awareness, which, in return, can help improve the students' communicative competence. We also find that the interviewees hold a positive attitude towards culture instruction and that they state their desire to develop their intercultural communicative competence. On the whole, culture teaching does help arouse students' cultural awareness and help improve their communicative competence.