A Study On The Absence And Introduction Of Chinese Culture In New College English Teaching

Language and culture are mutually interdependent and influence each other. Language is the carrier and media of language, and is the main manifestation of the culture, while culture restricts and reflects language. Different nations live in different ecological, regional, social and religious environment, historical background, customs, values, behavioral patterns, which correspondingly produce distinctive national character and unique features toward the world among different living groups. Therefore culture-specific items of cultural peculiarity appear. When conducting culture teaching in China, teachers only pay attention to the introduction of target culture, but largely ignore the introduction of Chinese culture. The phenomenon of inability to express Chinese culture, especially Chinese culture-specific items in English, which leads to the failure in achieving the ultimate goal of English teaching, that is, the cultivation of students’cross-cultural communication competence. The western culture-based, near-vacuum of Chinese culture and the imbalance of culture components in college English textbooks directly caused this failure. To enhance students’ cross-cultural communication competence, there is urgently need to make full use of college English textbook, integrate Chinese culture-specific items into English teaching and combine the organic culture with the target culture in culture teaching.The thesis is a study on Chinese culture teaching in college English teaching. It can be roughly divided into five parts. The introduction part introduces the problems of this paper intend to be solved, background of the research, purpose and significance of the study and the general structure of the thesis. The second part talked about the briefly review on the studies of culture teaching at home and abroad at first, then make a further expounded on related culture teaching theory:for example, the relationship between language and culture, Chinese culture-specific items and Byram’s criteria for good textbook evaluation. All of those provide theoretical support for the study. In chapter three the paper indicates the imbalance of culture-specific items, especially the serious deficiencies of Chinese culture-specific items in the textbooks and the necessity of integrating Chinese culture-specific items into college English teaching through the detailed analysis of cultural components in New College English according to Byram’s criteria for good textbook evaluation. Then the author designates several typical teaching experiments on how to integrate Chinese culture-specific items into language teaching. The results reflect that not only students" linguistic skills but also their intercultural communicative competence is greatly improved. At last, the paper indicates the result and limitation of the present study, as well as the presentation of suggestions for future research in college English teaching.