Strengthening Culture Teaching In SEFC Teaching Practice To Cultivate Students' Cultural Awareness

With the fast development of Chinese society, communication between China and other nations throughout the world are more and more frequent, so cross-cultural communicative competence is put forward to be the ultimate goal of foreign language teaching (FLT) in China, and cross-cultural awareness or cultural awareness is prescribed in the New English Curricular Standard (NECS) for the first time.Cultural awareness refers to the sensitivity and insight to the native and target culture, the self-consciousness of adjusting one's own language understanding and output to cope with the target culture when using the target language. Because of the indivisibility of language and culture, culture teaching should be integrated with language teaching in English teaching. However, most senior school English teachers in China always take the misunderstanding that culture teaching means only the teaching of cultural knowledge itself but ignore the cultivation of students' cultural awareness. In fact, cultivating students' cultural awareness is the goal of culture teaching, and cultural knowledge is the base of the cultivation of cultural awareness, that is, cultural awareness is gradually cultivated in learning and absorbing cultural knowledge, which then paves the way for culture understanding. So this thesis aims at exploring the approaches of how to involve the cultivation of cultural awareness in SEFC teaching practice.The thesis reviews the theory about culture teaching and cultural awareness as the basis of the research and further analysis. It starts with a view of the present situation of culture teaching, especially those problems in culture teaching. Culture teaching is long neglected or taken as a subordinate part of the language teaching in SEFC teaching practice. Worse still, the means of culture teaching is sole and simple; the aim of culture teaching is misunderstood as a glimpse of cultural knowledge only, but not as an essential step to develop students' correct attitudes and beliefs to the target culture. Therefore, the cultivation of cultural awareness is nearly wholly ignored in senior English teaching. This reality of English teaching results just from the influence of the...