On Culture Teaching In College English Teaching:Existing Pproblems And Tentative Solutions

Based on the theory of ideal personality and views on the relationship between culture and language, this thesis believes in the significance of culture teaching in English language teaching. Although related studies on culture teaching have been conducted by many scholars, few of them have involved the status quo and problems of culture teaching today in China. Thus, this thesis decides to probe into this topic. One cultural test paper and two questionnaires based on the research questions are adopted in this research. Participants are from four public universities in Zhejiang Province, including120students and80teachers.Through comparison between students'scores of cultural test and CET4, and comparison between scores of different parts of the test, the status quo is presented as follows:(1) students'cultural competence is much weaker than their linguistic competence;(2) students'ability of big C culture is weaker than that of small c culture;(3) students'competence of non-verbal culture is weaker than that of verbal culture. The researcher analyzes the results of the questionnaires and identifies the underlying problems of current culture teaching, which result in the above situations. These problems can be divided into three categories:(1) on the part of students:lack of deep perception on the relationship between language and culture, lack of proper motivation and attitudes, lack of rich channels to contact with foreign culture;(2) on the part of teachers:lack of diversified approaches to culture teaching, lack of enough cultural competence for a more systematic and scientific instruction;(3) on the part of courses: lack of corresponding cultural courses, lack of systematic and scientific content, the imbalance among different cultural aspects involved in culture teaching. All of these problems have negative impact on cultivation of students'ideal personality.In order to solve the above problems, this thesis offers corresponding strategies and suggestions:(1) on the part of students:strategies for cultivating an integrative motivation, developing proper attitudes towards both home and target culture;(2) on the part of teachers:five approaches, multiple culture-based activities and self-development plans are proposed;(3) on the part of courses:offering corresponding courses, selecting systematic content, forming a cultural perspective for compiling textbook, setting educational objective, and creating testing system in college English education.