Developing Cultural Communication Competence In Middle School English Teaching

In recent years, with the opening policy in China and globalization of economy, people from different cultural backgrounds need to exchange their ideas in English. Therefore developing the students' cultural awareness and competence has become a big challenge to the teachers of English.However, the real situation is that English teaching in China lays stress on the knowledge teaching to deal with the various kinds of examinations and tests. It is very common that students cannot express their ideas correctly in English and even talk in English. To address these concerns, the author puts forward in this paper the suggestion that the teachers of English should make great efforts in cultivating the students' cultural awareness and competence along with the knowledge and grammar points teaching at the different stages of the students' English learning. The teachers of English have the responsibilty to strengthen the students' cultural awareness and competence in their daily teaching.According to Hammely, information (or factual) culture and behavioral culture are important in second/foreign language teaching. The experiment in this paper is to find out the relationship between the cultural competence and knowledge teaching. The result of the research is that they influence each other and benefit from each other. The author adopted the ways of cultural teaching in his classroom instruction and it proved to be very successful.Though limitations seem inevitable with the research, it is hoped that the result of the research can serve as a revelation to the English teaching in the middle schools.