Cultivating Intercultural Awareness In English Discourse Teaching In Vocational Colleges

Language is the carrier of culture. Any language cannot exist without culture. Therefore it's necessary to input culture related to the target language. Discourse teaching is an important part in foreign language teaching, and culture teaching is dispensable in it. We can understand the discourse from its meaning and structure totally only by combining discourse teaching with culture teaching. In this way, we can reach the final goal of the discourse teaching. Recently, although an increasing number of scholars and English teachers have realized the importance of putting culture into discourse teaching, most of them give little systematic research on how to combine the culture with college English discourse teaching.Firstly, it gives a brief account of definitions of culture and close relationship among language, culture and communication based on the theory of linguistics. According to these statements, culture teaching plays a vital role in language teaching. Secondly, the author analyses current situation in English discourse teaching in vocational technical college based on a questionnaire designed for students and teachers respectively. The research findings show some problems in discourse teaching, the reasons and the urgent need for cultivating the intercultural awareness of the students. At last the author gives some suggestions and strategies on how to develop students'intercultural awareness as well as their communicative competence which eventually improve their intercultural communicative competence.