Study On The Cultural Factors In College English Textbooks And Their Applications To The Cultivation Of Cultural Communicative Competence

Some social contexts such as the coming of globalization, China's successful entry into WTO and the advocate of quality-oriented education require to empower the students with cultural awareness and competence. But what actually happens in the classroom does not meet this great challenge. It is undeniable that a great deal has been achieved in many years'efforts given by both the teaching staff and the students. In the process of teaching and research some advanced theories and teaching approaches have been introduced or created which contributed a lot to the educational cause. On the other hand, we should admit that certain problems exist which prevents FLE from developing fast. For example, the set of teaching goals in China has been based mainly on the syllabus designers'understanding of the nature of language, be it structural or notional/functional in approach. Not much attention has been paid to the learners, the learning process, materials development and the learning environment in which the target language is taught. It is now broadly accepted that learning a foreign language is not simply mastering an object of academic study but language learning and learning about target cultures cannot be separated. In Chinese educational circle, the focus of foreign language education in general is mainly on linguistic skills. The use of language in real context is often neglected, and the situation is even worse for the non-English majors. Recently, communicative approach and cultural factors have been given much more attention than before, but the real happenings in classroom are not satisfactory due to the reason that there is no specific prescription and description of culture and cultural teaching. Even some scholars have devoted to cultural studies, they are mainly interested in theoretical research. Few of them are classroom practitioners in EFL for non-English majors. So there is an urgent need for language teachers to conduct research by themselves in cultural teaching as an answer to this need and also owing to my interest, I did the research and this thesis is an outcome out of cultural teaching practice in non-English majors classroom.Theories adopted in the current study has been taken from research on pragmatics, particularly the notions of pragmatic competence intercultural pragmatics, socio-pragmatics, and speech act theory. As some of these aspects of theories are newly emergent and have not been fully formed, a synthesis of the concepts and ideas put forward by several main researchers in these fields has mainly been used in this study. The work of philosophers of John Austin and John Searle in the 1950s and 1960s formed the basis for speech-act theory, which today serves as a foundation for the study of pragmatics in interaction and speech act behaviors. Hymes and Gumperz first made explicit the connection between culture and language and treated interaction and speaking as culturally defined practices. They emphasized the need for studying the social contexts of speech acts, cultural influences in interactive, and the interactive competence of language users. The study of pragmatics examines assumptions, communicative goals, and types of speech actions that are used to achieve these goals. Thus pragmatic analysis explores how people understand particular forms of speech acts and their implications, and how assumptions and presuppositions that affect the speaker's intended meaning are understood.The relationship between culture and language is a long-standing question which causes many arguments. And now people tend to agree that the two are in a dialectical relationship. In 1993, in his article Halliday argued that"language neither drives culture nor is driven by it; the old question about which determines which can be set aside as irrelevant, because the relation is not one of cause and effect but rather one of realization: that is, language and culture co-evolve in the same relationship as that in which, within language, meaning and expression co-evolve…But given that language and culture evolve together in this kind relationship, it is inevitable that language will take on an ideological role"(Halliday, 1993: 10, cited in Kachru, 2001:75). This statement indicates that we should approach the relationship from the points of meaning and context, as meaning is variable and is realized at different levels of language, while context determines the understanding and the set of meaning.Scholars such as Nocon, Byram, Kordes, and Kramsch also made studies in culture and offered their suggestions to cultural teaching. These researchers studied culture from different angles and provided different terms to define their study. From this review we may conclude that the understanding of culture's role in language acquisition is evolved gradually from arbitrary to rational, and from narrow to broad. These studies give great impact on the teaching of language as well as culture. Applied linguists and language teachers have become increasingly aware that a foreign language can rarely be learned or taught without addressing the culture of the community in which it is used. From early 1980s, Chinese scholars and language practitioners showed their interest in target culture. The first decade can be viewed as the beginning stage, as the studies conducted during this period are rather preliminary and tentative. The 1990s witnessed a rapid development in this area, as a lot of articles and academic works were published at the time. These researches indicate that cultural teaching in FLE has drawn more and more attention and lots of progress has been made. However, most of the articles are only offering arguments. Those academic works made independent study and gave their own comments and suggestions with abundant examples and case studies, but in real teaching practice they are too complex to manipulate. That is to say, no great step has been taken towards the convergence of culture education and language teaching in pedagogical activities in Chinese EFL context, particularly in the non-English majors classroom. Before it is systematically incorporated in language teaching, cultural teaching cannot be satisfactorily conducted. The complexity of culture causes the problem that it is hard to decide what to teach in culture. By analyzing the connotations of culture I suggest that small culture is the first consideration as it is defined as containing everyday living style, patterns of behaving, thought, values, beliefs, social customs and habits, social norms and conventions, etc. Since these cultural aspects are closely related to everyday behavior, both linguistic and non-linguistic, they are highly recommended as cultural contents of foreign language teaching and learning.As we argued above, language and culture are closely related. We may say that wherever there is language, there is culture. So textbook still is the No. 1 resource to count on if one wants to implement cultural teaching, as a good textbook can be used as a teacher, a map, and a trainer. The present author analyzed the Intensive Reading Books (volume1-4) and found that lots of cultural information is entailed. By learning such material, besides getting some linguistic skills, our students could achieve cultural awareness and raise cultural competence. So if one wants to carry out cultural activity in classroom instruction, to exploit textbooks and draw out much cultural information is crucial. On the other hand, teacher himself should make full use of every chance to collect culture-related materials to use for classroom activities, as the role a teacher plays is not merely to transit knowledge. He can be a needs analyst, a curriculum designer, a material developer, a counselor, and even team memberI took a class of thirty-one freshmen as my subjects, and two tests were given to them to assess their linguistic competence and cultural awareness and competence respectively. It turned out that the students had a good mastery of linguistic skills while their knowledge of target culture was rather poor. I discussed the importance of understanding target culture and the students showed their interest in this aspect. So we began our cultural teaching from the beginning of the first semester. I analyzed all the ten units of intensive reading and singled out those items which are related cultural aspect in advance and assigned the tasks to the students for preparation. Then a whole period of class was spared for discussion. As for the specific procedure of my organization of the discussion, I followed what Tomlin and Stempleski proposed. In this thesis I took Unit 2 as an example to show my teaching of culture in class. Other examples were also presented for other aspects in terms of cultural teaching .Maybe it is a little earlier to say that my way of teaching is a success, because only one semester has passed, and owing to this short period, I did not give my students another test to check their cultural awareness and competence. But the effect is obvious. I am planning to continue this program and by the end of next semester another test will be conducted to evaluate the teaching outcome. In my plan, the test will consist of two parts—oral test and written test, through which both of their communicative and cultural competence can be checked. I'm expecting that the performances of the students would be quite satisfactory, and I'm sure that this can be achieved at the cost of our devotion to and our close co-operation for this worthwhile teaching and learning.