A Study On Culture Teaching Strategies In English Teaching In Vocational College

The fast development of social economy, the increasing needs of intercultural exchange and the accelerating globalization require that foreign language teaching should aim at cultivating learners’intercultural communicative competence (short for ICC hereafter). And foreign language teaching should center on the improvement of learners ICC.In recent years, more and more attention has been paid to how to cultivate students’ICC and the relevant teaching methodologies’study emerged in large numbers. However, these studies mainly aimed at high school students or learners in universities with few study concerning the higher vocational school students. Nevertheless, communicative competence and culture teaching are emphasized repeatedly in Basic Requirement of English Teaching for Vocational Education issued in2000, which fully indicates that incorporating culture teaching by using some teaching strategies in English teaching in vocational college is extremely urgent and necessary.Based on literature and questionnaires, the author investigated the "current situation of English culture teaching" in vocational college among160students in one of the vocational colleges in Xi’an. According to the investigation, the current situation of culture teaching in vocational college is not optimistic. Although students and teachers held the positive attitude towards the culture teaching, the present English teaching contents and activities in English classroom cannot meet the needs of cultivating students’ ICC because English class centered on four skills training with few English culture introductions. Besides, the study on the language teaching combined with culture teaching is relatively few and there is no generally accepted practical operating system. In view of the above-mentioned status, the author of this thesis attempted to explore the combination of language teaching with culture teaching by employing culture teaching strategies in English teaching in vocational colleges based on previous studies and the author’s teaching practice.In order to verify the effects of application of culture teaching strategies, the author selected two parallel classes from Northwest University Vocational School of Technology majoring in Computerized Accounting as experimental subjects and took New Hope College English teaching for example. The culture teaching experiment was conducted in two classes for four months. The purpose of the experiment was to verify quantitatively whether the culture teaching strategies offered by the author can aid learners improve their intercultural communicative competence, cultural awareness and comprehensive language application ability.During the process of experiment, language teaching was conducted together with culture teaching by using culture teaching strategies in experimental class; in contrast, language teaching with pure linguistic forms was still the focus of English class in control class. By the end of the experiment,"Intercultural Communicative Competence Test" was used to test the students’ ICC and cultural awareness. The results of the test papers showed that the learners in experimental class demonstrated fairly higher ICC, cultural awareness and comprehensive language application ability than the control class and had larger improvement.The tentative conclusion can be drawn that culture teaching strategies can help learners obtain students’ ICC and cultural awareness. However, due to the limitation of experimental class in teaching resources, sample subjects, etc, the research results should be practiced and tested more and deeper before it being promoted and applied to other vocational colleges. Nevertheless, it is still hopeful that this study can provide some reference and new thoughts for English teaching in vocational colleges.