Cultivating Cultural Awareness In College English Teaching

Language and culture are closely related with each other. College English learning is in fact cultural learning. In order to learn a foreign language well, one has to understand the target language culture, especially the differences between our native culture and target language culture. Therefore, college English teaching is not just training in such basic skills as listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. Most important of all is to conduct cultural teaching so as to enable students to understand the target language cultural background and enhance their cross-cultural awareness. Developing college students'cross-cultural awareness will help them to have a better mastery and use of English and realize that learning English is also learning culture at the same time. Only in this way can they master the language in the real sense.With the economic and social development, the communication between China and the outside world is increasingly frequent. People have more opportunities to contact foreign cultures. Culture teaching is playing an important role in college English teaching. At the same time, modern theories abroad concerning culture teaching are widely spread in China. As such, how to teach culture in college English teaching in the Chinese cultural environment is a hot topic. However, it is unfortunate up to now that no agreement has been reached in terms of how to effectively cultivate college students'cultural awareness in college English teaching and learning. Culture teaching needs to be imperatively improved. Inspired by the above discussion, the writer selects the topic of"Cultivating Cultural Awareness in College English Teaching"as the study in his Master's program.The writer carried out this study through a sociocultural test and two questionnaires among college English teachers and learners, with the expectation to get an objective view of the current status of culture instruction in college English teaching in China. Accordingly, suggestions for promoting the cultivation of college students'cultural awareness were put forward.The focus of the study is how to practically solve the problems in cultivating college students'cultural awareness. The writer applies"A Sociocultural Test"(Wang, 1990) and two self-designed questionnaires respectively answered by teachers and college students from four domestic universities to this study. The learner subjects'achievements of culture testing ("A Sociocultural Test") are used to be comparatively analyzed with that of language testing (CET4). Feedbacks from the teacher and student subjects are arranged according to their answers in the two questionnaires. Data analysis indicates the problems as follows. (1) College students'cultural competence is weaker than their linguistic competence. (2) College students'competence on the small c culture is stronger than their competence on the big C culture. (3) College students'competence on verbal communication is stronger than their competence on non-verbal communication. These problems show that language teaching and culture teaching are not balanced in college English teaching and teachers should pay more attention to the appropriate selection of sociocultural items in culture teaching. Feedbacks from college students in their responses to the questionnaire include the following aspects. (1) College students have not paid sufficient attention to culture learning. (2) College students'attitudes towards the native and target cultures should be adjusted. (3) College students have not quite clearly understood the relationship between language and culture. (4) College students have not completely grasped effective culture acquisition channels. Feedbacks from teachers in their responses to the questionnaire mainly concern such aspects as follows. (1) Methods used in cultivating college students'cultural awareness are simple. (2) Aspects of culture involved in culture teaching are one-sided. (3) The testing and evaluating system for the target culture requires to be improved. Thus, the writer advocates different methods for cultivating college students'cultural awareness in accordance with features of two stages of teaching and learning, namely curricular stage and extracurricular stage. Methods for cultural awareness cultivation at curricular stage are lectures of special topics, information presentation supported by technology, role-playing, group discussion and cultural inquiry. Literature reading, newspaper surveying, video watching, Internet surfing and intercultural communication are the specific ways used to cultivate college students'cultural awareness at extracurricular stage. The writer also puts forward pedagogical suggestions for the cultivation of college students'cultural awareness. These include making the treating of sociocultural competence an educational objective, compiling the textbooks from a cultural perspective, improving teacher's cultural ability through self-development, adjusting learner's attitude towards the native culture, and constructing culture testing and evaluating system. At last, the writer gives an analysis of cultural information in New College English and, based on the above contrastive analysis and an experiment, besides the suggestions put forward above, the writer puts forward another three specific suggestions from the perspective of cultural teaching in accordance with this course.The study focuses on the cultivation of college students'cultural awareness in college English teaching and aims at explaining how to effectively promote the target culture learning in a non-native context like China through adopting various ways of cultivating college students'cultural awareness. However, there are still some limitations in this study. It remains open to be discussed and improved.