The Integration of Cultural Courses in Higher Education: Enhancing Intercultural Awareness Among English Learners

Abstract

Language and culture are closely related with each other. Foreign language learning is in fact cultural learning. In order to learn a foreign langue well, one has to understand the TL culture, especially the differences between the SL culture and TL culture. Therefore, foreign langue teaching is not just training in such basic skills as listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. Most important of all is to conduct cultural teaching so as to enable students to understand the TL cultural background and enhance their cross-cultural awareness. Developing students’ cross-cultural awareness will help them to have a better mastery and use of English and realize that learning English is also learning culture at the same time. Only in this way can they master the language in the real sense. Otherwise, what they learn would be neither English nor Chinese. Through comparative analyses of the relation between language and culture and the common types of cultural differences between Chinese and English in English language learning. This paper expounds the importance of cross-cultural awareness in English teaching, analyzes the problems existing in present cross-cultural teaching and learning, summarizes a series of basic goals and basic contents of developing cross-cultural awareness, and proposes some effective methods as well as some principles to be observed.