A Study of Culture Teaching in College English Teaching

Abstract

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. 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.