A Survey Of The Potential Approaches In Acquainting Middle School Students With Cultural Context

People in different countries have different historical heritages, social customers, religious beliefs and so on. When people of different languages and cultures communicate, misunderstandings may arise although the language used in communication may be faultless. The same words or expressions may not mean the same thing to different people. In order to communicate with the foreign people, we should study not only their languages , but their cultures. That is , we should learn their own ways of thinking and acting. Culture consists of all the shared products of human society. This means not only such material things as cities, organizations and schools, but also non-material things such as ideas, customs, family patterns, languages. Putting it simply, culture refers to the entire way of life of a society. Language is a part of culture and play a very important role in it . Without language, culture would not be possible. On the other hand , Language is influenced and shaped by culture; it reflects culture. In the broadest sense, language is the symbolic representation of a people, and it comprises their historical and cultural backgrounds as well as their approach to life and their ways of living and thinking. Foreign language teaching should aim at promoting the communication. Only by doing so, can students make less misunderstandings and communicate more successfully.This paper discusses the importance of cultural acquaintance, puts forward a set of principles for cultural input, which are the principle of grading, the principle of adaptability, and the principle of the practicability. The paper also mainly presents various acquainting approaches of culture in the process of learning English according to the characters of Middle school English teaching. The author points out that students of different levers should be acquainted with different levers of cultural messages in the target language through the joint efforts of both teachers and students, several cultural acquainting approaches are systematically offered to develop the students' culturalnawareness by making the study of culture an integral part of course instruction of each lesson and a means of transforming students' cultural competence into cultural performance by way of organizing the students in practice. During the teaching, some acquainting approaches of culture are often interwoven. Only adopting the proper approaches, the teacher can help the students to overcome difficulties caused by the differences between the culture of the native language and that of the target language, that is to avoid cultural misunderstanding, which is the greater offence in cross-cultural communication than pure linguistic mistakes, cultural awareness should be one of the major goals in English language teaching. In order to increase student's cultural awareness, improvement must be made in teaching approaches. In brief, the teacher should put his students to the target culture as much and often as possible, and let them into achieve the higher cross-cultural awareness ultimately.