On The Use Of Cross-Culture Knowledge In Teaching Reading

People like to use the "global village" to describe the present world. Because of frequent cross-cultural communication, The world has become smaller and smaller. Intercultural communication was introduced into China by Hu Wenzhong and other scholars in the 1980s. Ever since then many Chinese scholars and foreign language teachers have been working in this field and have tried to apply the findings in their research to English teaching. Reading Course (RC) has been considered as the essential component of EFL ( English as Foreign Language) teaching and learning. Unfortunately, in China, reading has long been viewed as a passive process. Most teaching methods adopted in RC are to read the text quickly, retell the text, answer questions, do multiple choices and so on. The result of such teaching methods is that students lose their interest in RC and neglect the acquisition to culture.Culture is a vast topic. People may define the term from different perspectives. Simply speaking, culture refers to the entire way of life of a society. Language is a part of culture and is influenced and shaped by culture. Language and culture are independent and interwoven. Understanding of one requires understanding of the other. If one is to use a language well, he must know the culture of the people who speak the language. In the communication between people of different cultures, the greatest barrier lies not only in the differences of languages, but also in those of cultures, which permeate all aspects of human life. Cultural mistakes are even more serious and imitating than linguistic ones. Therefore, the importance of the target culture teaching has been drawing attention ever since.It is now widely recognized that communicative competence is the goal of foreign language teaching. The theory of communicative competence was first proposed by Dell Hymes in 1971. It refers to the ability to apply the grammatical rules of a language to form grammatically correct sentences and to know when and where to use these sentences and to whom. Communicative competence includes the understanding of...