论英语教育中的跨文化意识培养(英文)

Abstract: The thesis mainly discusses a most important problem about culture factors in the language education. With the methods of integrating theories into practice, the thesis presents the necessity and importance of culture teaching and the implement of it in the practical teaching. It comes to the conclusion that cultural awareness is necessary in cultivating students’ abilities to use a language properly.

Key words: Culture; Cross-culture awareness; English education

摘  要：本文探讨了外语教学中的一个重要课题：深入研究语言的社会文化因素，培养学生的外语文化意识，进而形成跨文化交际能力。文章运用理论联系实际的方法，论述了文化教学的必要性以及它在教学中的实践，提出跨文化意识是培养学生的综合语言运用能力的一个必不可少的保证。

关键词：文化；跨文化意识；英语教育

Introduction
The main purpose of English education is for inter-cultural communication and for communicating with the people who have different culture backgrounds. To improve the efficiency and quality of English teaching, to improve the learners’ ability of using foreign languages are not only the necessity of economy improvement, but also the task of china’s englishe ducation. For quite a long time, school English teaching in China’s mainland has been based on structuralism, which considers a language as a closed system and makes a point of the perception and recognition of the internal linguistic mechanism in teaching which enable learners to judge grammatical correctness of sentences, they emphasized the studying of the pattern of English, but ignored the influence of communicative functions from different cultures. However, in the teaching practice, it is found that with the knowledge of phonemic, syntactic and semantic rules of the target language, it is possible to create sentences without grammatical or lexical mistakes. But one still is incapable of communicating successfully in English-speaking contexts due to their failure to comprehend sociolinguistic rules. It is necessary to learn how to understand and create language that is appropriate to the situations in which one is functioning, employing the proper locution patterns in accordance with the sociocultural parameters of the specific situation, because failure to do so may cause users to miss key points that are being communicated in either written or oral language and have their messages be misunderstood. Worse yet is the possibility of a total communication breakdown and the stereotyped labeling of the foreign language users as people who are insensitive, rude, or inept. Therefore, the ignorance of culture in learning and teaching has not only affected students’ abilities of learning a foreign language, but also set up misunderstanding at communication level. In the Criteria of English Course for National Elementary Education issued in 2001, it’s illustrated that teachers should broaden students’ cultural vision and develop their awareness of inter-cultural communication. Language is an important tool of culture and closely related to culture. Teachers should treat well the relationship between them. This will help students understand foreign culture, especially culture and social custom in English-speaking countries. It will also help them enhance their abilities to understand and use English, to broaden cultural vision, and to get a further understanding about national culture and to form awareness of inter-cultural communication.

1  Language and culture
The relation of language to culture is that of part to whole.
1.1  Connotation of culture
Culture is such a broad concept that it is very diffiicult to give a strict and accurate definition. Since the early 20th century many philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and historians have been striving to define culture from different angles or disciplines. However, no definition has so far been to everybody's satisfaction. Statistics shows that different kinds of definitions of culture have amounted to at least two hundred. The vast difference in peoples understanding of culture shows the difficulty in defining the concept of culture. It is very hard to give a simple definition of culture. Instead, they regard culture as a broad concept, considering that culture includes all aspects of human life. [1] Broadly speaking, culture is a social phenomenon and it is a product created by human beings in the course of history. Culture is a historical phenomenon at the same time and it is the deposit of social history. Specifically speaking, culture is the total sum of the history, geography, customs, habits, tradition, living styles, literature, art, behavior, ways of thinking, concept of value and so on.
1.2 Relation between language and culture
The relation between language and culture may be analyzed from the following three aspects.
1.2.1 language is part of culture
Language is an inseparable part of culture. Language can not exist apart from culture. According to its components, culture includes material wealth and spiritual wealth. Language belongs to part of spiritual wealth, and it is a kind of spiritual product created by beings in the development progress of social history. Logically, language and culture have the relation of species and genus. Language can not exist without any culture. Judging from its layers, culture is the upper structure of the language.[2] The language structure, communication mode, rhetoric principle and so on are all affected and limited to a great extent by the "upper structure" of language. The different cultural structures of various nations may result in all kinds of differences in the expression of the languages of the various nations. For example, the general question in Chinese is expressed in indicative order in the language structure (eg." 他来了吗?")whereas the general question in English is characterized by the position of an auxiliary verb (e.g. "Has he come?"). [3] Analyzed from the angle of cognition, both cultural knowledge and language knowledge are acquired from social life after one is born. Culture knowledge is acquired in society while language is language ability unique to human beings and it is a set of knowledge system acquired or learned in the social language background after one is born.转贴于 酷文网-论文下载中心 http://www.coolwen.net