On Culture Teaching For Non-English Majors In College English Teaching

With the accelerating process of modernization, communication between different cultures and different districts becomes more and more prominent and frequent. Global interdependence, cultural diversity and change become visible everywhere and raise an inescapable question: how to achieve success in intercultural communication? It is a problem that attracts people's attention. Nowadays, developing learners' intercultural communicative -competence has been the ultimate goal of foreign language teaching. To develop learners' ICC competence and to avoid pragmatic failure in intercultural communication, culture teaching is in vital need in GET.Culture teaching is related to language teaching, but different from language teaching. In China, teachers tend to develop their students' linguistic competence. They show little concern for the development of students' cultural awareness and sociocultural competence. If we input culture teaching, we have to adjust the relationship between language teaching and culture teaching, we have to handle the contradiction between them in the limited time. In the hope of improving culture teaching in GET and facilitating learners' sociocultural competence, this dissertation attempts to explore an effective way of culture teaching for non-English majors in GET.Chapter One gives a brief account of the current state of college English teaching and the importance of cultural factors in intercultural communication. Though non-Englishmajors have studied English for several years, most of them cannot communicate with foreigners properly. This is because linguistic competence is almost one aspect of language teaching. In college English teaching, teachers neglect the teaching of culture in classroom and the development of students' intercultural communicative competence. Then it draws a general framework of this dissertation.Chapter Two analyzes the definitions of culture and intercultural communication, explores the relationships between language and culture, and that between culture and intercultural communication. Language and culture are closely related to each other. On the one hand, language is a part of culture and plays a very important role in it. On the other hand, language is shaped by culture and it reflects culture. Culture and intercultural communication are inseparable. Culture affects intercultural communication. Intercultural communication is cultural. Culture teaching abroad and at home is also reviewed. Abroad there are three trends of culture teaching known as "explicit culture teaching", "implicit culture teaching" and "a synthetic approach". In China, the importance of culture teaching has been recognized, but the practice is still in its infancy. "What to teach" and "how to teach" remain unsolved.Chapter Three explores four cultural barriers to intercultural communication, inspired by two cases of intercultural misunderstanding. These four barriers are barrier based on language, barrier based on non-verbal behavior, barrier based on styles, conventions and practices and barrier based on basic culture values.Chapter Four concentrates on elaborating the objective of culture teaching. This chapter analyzes the development of intercultural communicative competence. At last, the objective of culture teaching in GET is specified. That is to develop students' sociocultural competence that includes knowledge, attitudes, performance skills and creativity at least.Chapter Five is dedicated to drawing the content framework of culture teaching. According to Hu and Gao (1997: 161), "content of cultural behavior" and "content of cultural psychology" make up the content of culture teaching. How to deal with culture teaching is also given. The author proposes a new synthetic approach to CT. This newly proposed synthetic approach suggests that culture teaching should be conducted both in language classroom and outside classroom.Chapter Six serves as the core of this dissertation. Some effective and useful techniques are introduced with an aim to enhance culture teachi...