Cultivation of cross-cultural awareness in college English teaching

Abstract

With the implementation and deepening of new curriculum reform, the English teaching quality must meet a higher demand. English teaching is an important and difficult part in the field of education in our country. Due to long-term focus on imparting of language knowledge itself but ignorance of culture teaching, most of the college students’ cross-cultural awareness in our country is relatively weak. In English communication, students are likely to make various mistakes or behave disrespectfully in cross-cultural communication due to their miscomprehension of culture background of language. So it is obvious that fostering students' cross-cultural awareness is of great significance in college English teaching process. This paper carries on a simple analytical study on the main approach to cultivate students’ cross-cultural awareness in college English teaching. Keywords—College English teaching; Cross-cultural awareness; cultivating English is a course with the longest curriculum time in the universities in our country, whose teaching effect is unsatisfactory relatively to the other courses. Many students, after several years’ English learning, still cannot effectively use English in communication. There are many factors that can influence the effect of college English teaching, and one of the most important one lies in lacking of targeted cultivation of the students’ cross-cultural consciousness. For a foreign language, if students fail to have a detailed understanding of the relationship between language and culture background, they won’t achieve an in-depth understanding of the connotation of language or can't use the language to communicate effectively. In recent years, the importance of culture teaching is increasingly valued, and more and more teachers have found the importance of cross-cultural awareness in English teaching and strengthen the cultivation of students’ cross-cultural consciousness through a variety of approaches. I. THE NECESSITY OF TRAINING STUDENTS’ CROSS-