A Study Of The Lack Of Chinese Traditional Culture In Cultivating Students' Intercultural Communication Awareness

Culture teaching plays a very important role in TEFL in China, which is widely acknowledged by English teaching circle. Cultivating students' intercultural communication awareness has been one of the main objectives of TEFL these years. But for today's students, they just learn pure Western texts and accept Western culture while knowing little about their own traditional culture. The influence of this one-side flow of the target culture reflects on the low ability of expressing Chinese traditional culture in English. Since students don not know how to express their own culture in English, the intercultural communication proved to be low efficient.Based on the theories of Hanvey (1979) and many other scholars, consulted with the requirement in cultivating students' ability of intercultural communication awareness raised by English Curriculum Standard, a survey has been made among 101 Grade Two students and 23 English teachers in Wujiang Experimental Junior Middle School. The survey aims to find out how Fun with English influences students' ability of expressing Chinese traditional culture in English and how students and teachers understand it, and therefore to provide some evidence for the problem.The main conclusions are as following:Firstly, teaching materials have positive correlation with students' ability of expressing Chinese traditional culture in English.Secondly, teachers share the similar understanding on cultural teaching while having different ideas in expressing traditional culture in English. And it's a big problem that culture teaching is not systematic. Having no effective teaching methods has been proved to be another problem. Meanwhile, teachers haven't realized that their own abilities of expressing Chinese traditional culture in English are poor.Thirdly, students show little interest in expressing Chinese traditional culture. It may tie in the brutal competition in school work and the Benthamism in studying.However, the survey is made only in one school and because of the limitation in research materials and the author's knowledge in this field, some aspects of the thesis need further discussion and exploration.