Abstract

Language is the carrier of culture, playing the role of cultural heritage. Knowing a language does not only mean knowing the grammatical rules, but also knowing the cultural background lying behind the language. Moreover, with the rapid development of technology and society, the world is making for development of globalization and this trend also makes the world become a global village. The frequent communications of the villagers from different countries who have different colors, different languages and different cultural backgrounds enhance people’s global awareness. Meanwhile, foreign languages are used more and more frequently. All of this makes the intercultural communication become a typical feature in our times. In the course of communication, people who have different cultural backgrounds can’t avoid the problems of cultural discrepancy which may make Chinese students fail to learn English effectively. Therefore, we must pay more attention to cultivation of students’ intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence in English teaching. New English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School puts forwards that cultural awareness, cultural understanding and intercultural communicative competence have been one of the goals of English basic education. For this situation, it is necessary to cultivate and improve students’ intercultural communicative competence. However, for a long time, Chinese English education in senior high school has always put the focus on the instruction of linguistic knowledge but ignore the teaching and learning of western cultural background, which results in students’ failing in the intercultural communicative competence. This paper emphasizes the importance of intercultural communicative competence and lists some common problems in today’s English teaching in the senior high school. In order to counter these typical problems, the paper puts forward some suggestions about cultivating and improving students’ intercultural communicative competence in the hope that students would acquire both cultural knowledge and linguistic knowledge simultaneously through communicative language teaching.

Key words: English teaching; culture; intercultural communicative competence

摘要

语言是文化的载体，起着传承文化的作用。我们要真正了解和掌握一门语言，就必须了解和掌握产生和使用这种语言的社会文化背景。随着科技的不断进步和社会的迅猛发展，世界正向全球化发展，也使得世界成为一个“地球村”。有着不同肤色、不同语言、不同文化背景的“村民”日益频繁的交往使人们的全球化意识不断增强，同时外语的使用也变得越来越频繁。这一切使得跨文化交际成为我们这个时代的一个突出特征。在交际过程中，不同文化背景的人们避免不了文化差异的问题。这种文化差异对中国学生学习英语会产生一定的干扰。因此，在英语教学中，我们必须重视学生跨文化意识和跨文化交际能力的培养。新的《高中英语课程标准》提出，文化意识、文化理解和跨文化交际能力已经成为英语基础教育的目标之一。针对这一形势，培养和提高学生跨文化交际能力势在必行。然而长期以来，我国的中学英语教学始终把重点放在语言知识的传授上，忽略了西方文化知识的传授与学习，从而导致学生跨文化交际能力普遍偏低。笔者根据实践经验，列举了一些在当今高中英语教学中普遍出现的问题，并且针对这些典型的问题提出了培养和提高中学生跨文化交际能力的建议，力求使学生在交际型模式的英语教学中达到文化背景知识和语言知识共同习得的目的。

关键词：英语教学；文化；跨文化交际能力