A Study Of Inputting Cultural Elements In The Teaching Of Listening And Speaking Under The New College English Curriculum Requirements

The ignorance of improving the competence of listening and speaking, being afraid of communicating with others, and the shortage of sociocultural knowledge have become the key obstacles to the enhancement of college students'English proficiency. In 2007 the latest College English Curriculum Requirements was published, in which listening and speaking are given the top priority and the competence of intercultural communication is one of the ultimate goals for college English. So this paper chooses it as its topic, the study on how to input cultural elements in the teaching of listening and speaking of college English.Firstly, on the premise of analyzing the close relationship between culture and language, the author discusses the similarities and differences among the five teaching syllabuses and the new College English Curriculum Requirements and points out that in order to improve students'competence of listening and speaking and their intercultural capacity, teachers should make the most of the combination of two teaching models, the in-class teaching model and the computer-and Web-based teaching model.Secondly, in the light of the students'low competence of listening and speaking and the poor knowledge of intercultural communication, the author proposes a hypothesis that there must be some correlation between these two aspects. By doing the sociocultural test and the follow-up questionnaire to the subjects, the authenticity of her assumption is finally confirmed. And then two more questionnaires for the English teachers and native speakers are subsequently designed and operated.Last but not the least, to solve this problem and based on the two different teaching models how to introduce cultural elements into the teaching of listening and speaking and what approaches should be adopted are offered in detail in this part. Altogether there are ten methods based on the in-class teaching model and four major ways in the computer-and Web-based model. They are mainly as follows:1) using authentic materials; 2) culture capsules; 3) culture assimilators; 4) culture island; 5) mini-drama; 6) surfing the Internet, and so on. These suggested approaches which are popular among the students are comprehensive and complete in scale and in type and theoretically or practically tested by the scholars or by the author herself, and some of them show certain creativeness. And it is the author's hope that all this will make a step forward for today's college English listening and speaking teaching in practice.