Culture Integration In College English Intensive Reading

With the development of science and technology,the world is becoming smaller than ever before.English as the world's universal language plays an important role in international exchanges.As a mandatory course in Chinese colleges and universities, English is considered of great significance.It is found that many college students,after years of formal English education,remain deficient in communication,especially intercultural communication.To achieve the goal of developing college students' intercultural communication competence,culture integration is indispensable in college English teaching.The core of this study lies in how to do culture integration effectively in non-English major students' intensive reading class.The study contains two surveys and an experiment.The survey focuses on investigating the current situation of culture introduction and teaching among college English education.A teacher survey and a student survey are conducted to investigate how well students have developed their intercultural communication competence and what is the real situation of culture introduction and teaching in higher education in this paper.The subjects of the teacher survey are 80 experienced English teachers,and the subjects of the student survey are 107 students from Jiangsu University.An experiment is also operated to examine whether certain methods of culture introduction are effective.The experiment is made up of a pre-test,a post-test,and a training in intensive reading class between the two tests.The test paper is based on the "Socio-cultural Test" put forward by Wang Zhenya(2005) and their final exam paper. The aim of the study is to develop a theoretical frame of culture introduction and teaching method in college English teaching.The student survey reveals that students do not have enough cultural awareness and students are examination-oriented in English learning.Their culture knowledge is poor and their intercultural communication competence is low.The teacher survey reveals that teachers have enough cultural awareness,but do little to carry out culture introduction and teaching in the class because of limitation from the outside and their own shortages.The experiment shows that although students' test results are not very satisfactory,they do make progress in culture knowledge,intercultural communication competence and language proficiency.The mean of post-test has improve by 8.6667 comparing to the pre-test,and the standard deviation of the post-test decreases,which implies students' average level improves.The mean of students' final exam also increases by 5.3 comparing to the mean of last semester.This result implies that the training is effective.From the two surveys and one experimental study,some pedagogical implications are concluded:1) teachers should try to help students raise their cultural awareness by emphasizing the importance of culture learning,and make adjustment in teaching syllabus to integrate some culture knowledge;2) the contents of culture introduction and teaching should be carefully chosen;3) certain teaching methods,such as using questions to guide students learn culture knowledge initiatively,having classroom activities like role-play,presentation,mini-drama and so on,should be used to help students improve their intercultural communicative competence and enrich their culture knowledge;4) culture items should be integrated into the language test in order to put forward a higher requirement for students.It is also found that students become more interested in English learning after adding culture information into language teaching.