Enhancing Cultural Awareness In EFL Teaching

English, as the most widely used language, plays an important role in the international communication. As a result, more and more linguists have turned to the research on the applied linguistics. Many of them realized that culture gap is a big barrier in the intercultural communication and made many theories on culture and language. Some language teachers also realized the importance of culture awareness in English teaching and put it into teaching practice.Based on the theories on the culture and language, this paper is aiming at emphasizing the importance of culture learning in traditional language classroom. Based on a research project, the researcher examined 60 high school students beliefs of language-and-culture learning and their actual strategies in the process of culture learning through a questionnaire survey, of which 15 was interviewed. Findings obtained indicate that there are strong beliefs of culture learning in traditional language classroom. However, in reality, few students employ proper strategies to learn culture and, obviously, there is a lack of guidelines to the performance of their culture learning . So this paper put forward this topic to language teachers: to enhance the cultural awareness, to adjust teaching strategies, and to create a good cultural environment for language learners. And the paper also analyzes the factors that affect students'process of culture learning. In addition, the guidelines of culture teaching are also analyzed in order to achieve the improvement in actual teaching. The paper also makes some suggestions on"what to teach"and"how to teach". The paper at last suggests some questions for further research on language-and-culture teaching.