An Empirical Study Of Problems Of Culture Teaching In College English Teaching For Non-English Majors

Under the background of globalization, intercultural communication has become a tendency. Hence, to cultivate college students’ intercultural communication competence has become the necessary task for English teaching, which makes people realize the significance of culture teaching. However, in current English teaching, very little attention is given to culture teaching. It is far from satisfying the demand of cultivating college students’ intercultural communication competence. Fortunately, many scholars have realized this point and put efforts on the researches of culture teaching. Among these researches, most of them are theoretical studies, while only a few researches are empirical studies. Among these limited empirical studies, the study of the problems of culture teaching in college English teaching for non-English majors, which takes the cultivation of students’ intercultural communication competence as the goal, is very few. The purpose of this thesis is to find out the existing problems of culture teaching, from the aspects of English teachers’ culture teaching and students’ culture learning and with the goal of cultivating students’ intercultural communication competence, and then put forward some suggestions.Based on the related theories of culture teaching, this thesis takes 63 college English teachers and 219 non-English major students as subjects to conduct a research in order to find out the problems in culture teaching. This thesis takes descriptive analysis, compute and main component analysis as quantitative analysis methods to analyze the data collected by questionnaires and takes qualitative analysis to deal with the records of the interview to 12 college English teachers. Through data analysis, this research found out the following problems of current culture teaching:Talking from the perspective of college English teachers, most teachers have realized the importance of culture teaching, but they are not clear about the goals and focus of culture teaching. In actual teaching process, very little attention is given to the explanation of culture knowledge, especially Chinese culture. Compared with language teaching, culture teaching is still at a random state. Meanwhile, teaching methods conducted by most teachers are relatively traditional— mainly teachers’ explanation-centered teaching methods, which impedes students to acquire culture knowledge and to perceive culture difference. As for college English teachers themselves, most of them are at relatively low level in intercultural communication competence and are inadequate in the storage of native culture and target culture, which is not favorable to culture teaching. As for college students, on one hand, most of them have no thorough cognition to culture learning. On the other hand, most students are inactive in culture learning and do not keep a balance between culture learning and language learning, so they are at a relatively low level of intercultural communication competence.Based on the existing problems, the researcher puts forward several suggestions: firstly, college English teachers should establish clear cognition to culture teaching, manage the relationship between language teaching and culture teaching appropriately, and enrich methods of culture teaching in order to integrate culture teaching into language teaching. Secondly, college English teachers should enhance their intercultural communication competence and enrich their culture storage of both target culture and native culture. Thirdly, as for college students, they should form clear cognition to culture learning, keep a balance between culture learning and language learning and put culture learning into practice by spending enough time and enriching ways of culture learning.