3.1 Schools and Classrooms as Communicative Environment
One strand of current research concerned with the language and culture of classrooms looks at the communicative environments of schools and classrooms drawing ethnography of communication approach to describe features typical of particular classroom environments. These studies seek to answer questions school what do classroom communities look like? What are the typical communicative event and activities? What are the conventional norms and patterns of participation? Who are the participants．And what roles do they play? Early studies like those of Saville-Troike and Kleifgen(1986)and Saville-Troike(1987) used Hymes’s framework to investigate the various social activities and their conventional patterns and notions of participation found in elementary classrooms in the United States that include linguistically and culturally diverse students. Forest (1989) used Hymes’s framework to examine the communicative events of a classroom in an urban community college taught by an African American teacher to African American students to uncover the social conventions particular to a community of learners who were considered non-standard English users. As a final example, Duff(1995)used the ethnography of communication approach to examine the different patterns of language use found in content-based English immersion classrooms in Hungary． Additional studies on classrooms and on language classrooms in particular have used more general ethnographic methods data confront varied sources and include videotapes of classroom activities, interviews with teachers and students, and institutional archives and written documents that are typical of the learning communities. Some of these studies take a language socialization perspective-which ties learner development to their contexts of learning and examining the content of language use in school contexts. Their aim is to uncover the particular cultural false embodied in the classroom routines and activities so that we may understand more fully with the worlds into which learners are being socialized along with the participants’ own understandings of their worlds and their positions within them. Other studies have been concerned with linking learners’ classroom lives to the larger social, political, economic and historical conditions that give them shape. Still, others have been concerned with uncovering the cultural and embodied in the particular identities that teachers and students adopted or are appropriated into within their learning communities.
Taking the classroom as his unit of analysis and using ethnographic methods to collect and analyze his data, 原文请+QQ3249,114 辣.文^论,文'网 Canagarajah(1993)investigated students’ attitudes towards learning English as they were reflected in their involvement in a university-level English classroom in Sri Lanka．He noticed that while they were: resistant to the Americanized cultural discourses found in their textbooks, the learners were strongly motivated in learning English for socioeconomic advantage in their communities. He concluded the full understanding of what happens inside a classroom must also be based on an understanding of the sociopolitical forces with which students must contend outside the school.
3.2 Culture Consciousness and English teaching
To teach English, culture teaching is unavoidable as well. A language can never be taught in a cultural vacuum. To develop students’ culture consciousness become a “must” for English teaching especially recent years. Based on some research, both at home and abroad, people conclude that foreign language teaching should focus on cultivating students’ abilities of cross-cultural communication and the culture consciousness. In cross-culture communication, it is required not only the knowledge of phonetics, grammar, vocabulary, language function, but also the understanding of the culture which came with the target language. However, for a very long time, the relationship between language and culture did not receive much attention that it should, neither the teacher nor the students. The misunderstanding goes to learn English means training of listening and speaking, writing and reading, and to mater pronunciations, vocabulary and grammar rules will lead you to perfect understanding of English and in fluency of English communicating. In reality, because the lack of culture knowledge, the misunderstanding of the culture difference sometimes can gain you a big lost in business. So as English learning, many words being misunderstanding and misusing again and again.
The American socialists G.R.Tucker and W.E.Lambet see foreign language without culture attach will lose the learning interests of students. And it’s not simple symbols itself but the whole nation who’s using the language. In contrary, we, as the language teacher should help to built students’ sensitivity of culture consciousness and to stimulate their interests and motive to know other nations so that to accumulate the basic needs for language learning.