A Study Of Culture Teaching In College English Teaching

Language and culture are intertwined and language is an inseparable part of culture. Language, as the carrier of culture, is influenced and shaped by culture; it reflects culture and plays a very important role in it. Because of different cultural backgrounds, misunderstandings often arise among people who speak different languages even there are not any grammatical mistakes in their conversation, thus intercultural communication failure occurs. With the development of economic globalization, intercultural communication is greatly increasing. More and more foreign language educators have realized that we should attach more importance to culture in our foreign language teaching and a new term"culture teaching"is introduced.In this thesis I first introduce the conception, content, goal, and significance of culture teaching, and its development both at home and abroad. Then I discuss some specific strategies and techniques of culture teaching, and mainly present the"ARRE"way based on my own experiencing and thinking of college English teaching to cultivating non-English major students'intercultural communicative competence. The"ARRE"way refers to raising students'intercultural awareness; well-dealing with several relationships; exerting teachers'roles; and stimulating students'enthusiasm of learning. At last, I talk about some challenges in the process of carrying out culture teaching, including over-emphasis on students'language proficiency, limitations of culture itself and difficulties coming from English language teachers, etc.Through the thesis I mainly want to draw people's attention to the importance, significance and necessity of culture teaching. We should have correct attitudes towards language and culture, towards language teaching and culture teaching. At the same time, we should be fully aware that putting culture teaching in English teaching practice is still a challenging task and it still has a long way to go. Not only relevant scholars and experts but also common English language teachers should have a clear macroscopical grasp of culture teaching in order to cultivate students', especially non-English major students'intercultural communicative competence to catch up with the development of the world.