From the perspective of NEEC (National Entrance Examination for Colleges), English is considered to be important to all senior school students. For most students, the motivation of learning English is just a means to pass the exams and get high scores in English proficiency tests. And the teachers of English are just the facilitators of realizing this goal. Teachers’ greatest concern is given to the mastery of linguistic knowledge and skills. Students spend most of the time on learning vocabulary, structures and grammar through lots of drills, practice and consolidation so as to memorize those linguistic elements and reproduce them. Cultural knowledge is ignored. In this case, culture is often separated from its carrier--language. Both teachers and students’ cultural awareness are poor. The lack of cultural knowledge leads to the failure in communication. Thus cultural education in senior English becomes absolutely necessary.
3.The contents of cultural introduction in senior English teaching
A language is inseparable from its culture. Hence, the process of learning a language is a process of learning its culture. Traditional foreign language teaching in China attaches great importance to language teaching but ignores cultural teaching, which, as a result, has caused some barriers in intercultural communication. Therefore, English teachers should try to improve students’ cultural awareness. The following are some suggestions for senior English students:
3.1Greetings and addresses
One of the mistakes Chinese students often make is to greet native speakers of English by saying “How old are you? Where are you going? What’s your income?” In China, such questions indicate friendliness and concern of one person for another. So Chinese students think that the foreigners will have the same reactions to these questions. But in fact, in America, questions like these interfere into people’s private life.
Traditionally, Chinese family is a big family. Children, parents, grandparents live together. Family members could hardly keep anything secret. It is considered quite normal that neighbors interrupt a quarrelling couple. Yet for Americans they would prefer to call the police instead of breaking into the door of their neighbors, because they wouldn’t run the risk of being accused of interfering into other’s privacy.
Here is another example. After winter vocation, some students go to visit their foreign teacher. At the first sight of the English teacher, a student greets him, “Congratulations! You look whiter and fatter after this vocation!” Hearing this, the teacher’s face turns pale with fright, “Oh, no!” In Chinese traditional culture, the adults prefer to describe healthy kids as “white and fat”. But in Britain and America, especially for the white man, “white and fat” means unhealthy because of lack of sunshine and exercises. So western people are very fond of sunbath and various sports to keep healthy. This Chinese student neglects the cultural differences and causes the English teacher’s misunderstanding.
Cultural differences can also be found in the way people address their relatives. There are no English equivalents to the different forms of Chinese address like “堂弟”, “表姐”, “伯父”, “舅舅”. But only “cousin” and “uncle” in English are used to address. The difference
