1 Introduction
The linguist Robert Lado defines the goal of learning a foreign language as “the ability to use it, understanding its meanings and connotations in terms of the target language and culture, and the ability to understand the speech and writing of natives of the target culture in terms of their great ideas and achievement” (Lado, 1964: 25)[1](p90) The teaching of a foreign language inevitably involves the teaching of foreign culture.
With China’s open-up policy and entry in WTO, how to lay a solid foundation for cultivating learners intercultural communicative competence in high-school education becomes an important objective in teaching English as a Foreign Language. For the first time “culture awareness” is prescribed in the New English Curriculum Standard. Culture instruction may be new to most middle-school English teacher in an examination-oriented environment in China’s EFL context. But the research and practice of intercultural communication still have a long way to go before they reach satisfactory results.
This paper, therefore, aims to present what most actual practices in the classroom are need to be clarified before anything can be done to improve future practices, when the new English Curriculum Standard is to be carried out in elementary education.
There are three major parts in the paper: firstly, it is the literature review, which consist of the relation of culture and teaching and current situation of English Teaching in China. Secondly, the extent to how to present cultural background information and expose learners to it in the need of English teaching so as to help learners grasp the crux of the language and develop their ability to communicate in English, followed by the introduction of some of such techniques. Finally the model of classroom practices was proposed by the teaching culture.
2 Culture teaching and language teaching
2.1 Definition of the culture
Definitions of culture range from broader ones to narrower ones since culture is ubiquitous, multidimensional, complex, and all-pervasive and many definitions have been suggested from different angles. From a definition that includes all learned behavior, we can move to a definition that proposes culture with distinct boundaries. “Bates and Plog (1990) proposed a descriptive definition that includes most of the major territory of culture on which scholars currently agree. 转贴于 酷文网-论文下载中心 http://www.coolwen.net
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