The Cultivation of Cross—Cultural Awareness in English Teaching

【摘 要】By putting certain ideas about communication, culture, society, education and human psychology together, a different way of facing with and learning about interaction among cultures has emerged. So a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of inter-culture contact and interaction has widened and deepened the research in this field. Furthermore, it is necessary to help students to build up a certain 'cultural awareness' during the teacher's English Teaching. This article will first explain inter-culture communication and how to develop cross-culture awareness in details. Meanwhile, the thesis puts forwards a series of strategies for cultivating students' cultural awareness, and systematically designs different cultural activities to make the study of culture an integral part of each lesson. Finally, several practical suggestions are proposed for the foreign language teachers to fulfill this project.

【关键词】intercultural communication cultural awareness cultivation strategies foreign language teaching

1.Introduction

Inter-cultural communication has been promoted since late 1970s mainly in the United States. As we have known, language diversity has become a prominent issue in the United States. People living within the same geographical boundaries can also use language in ways that differ from the dominant culture. Studies of cultural communities in the United States were considered 'intra-cultural', just as America was thought to represent one culture. Another point is that beginning in the 1960s, and continuing well into the 1980s, the mission of intercultural studies was largely to prepare students for travel abroad, which usually meant Europe. (陈申, 1998:120)

While, the inter-cultural communication studies in China is a short one with its beginning dated to the early eighties. If we compare intercultural communication studies in China with such studies in the United States, we will find some important differences.

First, much of the research in intercultural communication so far is language oriented or language related. This is because teachers and professors of foreign languages were the first to embrace inter-cultural communication as a discipline. Since their chief goal in inter-cultural studies is to improve the communicative competence of the learners, they naturally focus their attention on such aspects of language as the cultural connation of certain words and phrases, difference in pragmatic rules and discourse pattern and problems of equivalence in translation. While the American model wields the greatest influence among Chinese intercultural communication scholars, European intercultural studies have their impact too.