On Cultural Awareness Building In English Teaching At Middle School

In traditional English teaching, much attention is paid to knowledge such as vocabulary, phrases, grammatical rules and so on, while the cultural background of the language is ignored. As a result, students who have learned English for many years have no sense of the differences between the two languages in their cultural backgrounds and the customs of the people who speak the language. The ignorance has caused lots of disagreements, misunderstandings, and even laughingstocks in their communicating with the native speakers.The close relationship between language and culture is clear. Brown once said: "Language, the means for communication among members of a culture is the most visible and available expression of that culture, cultural patterns, customs and way of life (Brown, 1994:170) ." In other words, if an English learner doesn't know the culture and the social backgrounds of the language, the customs of its speakers, surely he has not grasped the spirit of the language.The inseparable relationship between culture and language definitely shows the increasing necessity of cultural education in English teaching. Thus, the transmission of cultural information should go hand in hand, and be closely combined with teaching of vocabulary, expressions, idioms, patterns and contexts on the basis of certain teaching principles in practice; Students should be encouraged not only to have a good command of the language knowledge and skills, but also to develop the cross-cultural communicative competence.As everyone knows, with the rapid development of technology and society, the globalization is the main-stream of world development. Because of the frequent communication and close connection between the people all over the world, and especially after China entered the WTO, foreign languages are used more and more widely. During the cross-cultural communication, if one is ignorant of the cultureand customs of the other, he\she is surely unable to have a good understanding of the other and can't carry on the communication further. As English is the most widely used language, it's quite necessary for us to know the culture and customs of the people of the English-speaking countries. That's the reason why we need not only to improve the language skills, but also to cultivate their ability of the cross-cultural communication.However, the present situation of middle school English teaching is still worrying us. This is because-Firstly, the idea of the traditional English teaching takes root in the hearts of the middle school English teachers. Grammar, translation, language points are still playing a major part in English classes, where the students can get no chance or very few chances to practice and cultivate the ability of the cross-cultural communication. As a result, the language loses its function and nature in such classes and the students who come out of those classes are, of course, "dumb" and "deaf in using the language.Secondly, during the years from 1977 to 1999, only written English was tested in NMET ( National Matriculation English Test), until recently in 2000, listening was added to it in some of the provinces and regions. For so many years, all the teachers and the students have been taking great pains to prepare themselves for one examination after another. They had to do so, otherwise they would be afraid to lag behind in competing against others in the name lists given by the school or the educational administration. In the end, they are excellent at taking exams and getting high marks, but poor in communicative competence.Thirdly, most teachers have not yet realized the importance of building cultural awareness of the students, which is the biggest problem for the cultural education to be carried out in middle school English teaching. From the investigation, we have surprisingly discovered that most teachers turn a deaf ear to the cultural information in the texts and that almost no student is able to communicate smoothly and efficiently with a native speaker in English.Therefore, thi...