The Study Of Culture Teaching In College English Teaching Based On The Whorf Hypothesis

The rapid development in communication technology and economic globalization has made intercultural communication an inseparable part of people’s life. More and more high-quality talents with intercultural communicative competence are needed in our society. As cultures differ from one another, failure to understanding cultural differences tends to result in failures in communications. This has advanced new requirements for college English teaching in China. Cultivating learners’communicative competence is the utmost goal of foreign language teaching. Therefore, teachers should teach learners the knowledge of the language and the usage of the language in real communications.Therefore, under the goal of cultivating learners’ communicative competence; culture teaching should be treated as a necessary component in foreign language teaching.On the basis of the Whorf hypothesis, this study did a series of surveys to present an authentic picture of China’s college English culture teaching, find out the specific problems as well as their causes. This study utilized questionnaires to survey110 students enrolled in Xi’an Polytechnic University in September of 2013, whose major is non-English and then interviewed teaching staff to analyze problems and their causes in culture teaching.The result of the statistical analysis shows that most of students think the conduction of culture introduction can help them improve their overall English levels. However, in the real English teaching process, the frequency of culture introduction is still very low. Although teachers have realized the importance of culture teaching, their understanding and practice of culture teaching in their classes are still not ideal. Through the combined analysis of questionnaire and interview survey, the study further analyses main factors influencing culture teaching:poor implementation of teaching objective; biased understanding of teaching content; improper use of teaching approaches.On the basis of this, the author introduces three implications for culture teaching: integrating culture teaching into college English class; strengthening bilingual cultural reflection; cultivating students’ intercultural communicative competence.At the end of the thesis, some limitations are provided and the conclusion is made that culture introduction is really important and there is a lot to be done in how to conduct culture teaching.