4 Current Situation of English Teaching in China
4.1 Current situation
For a very long time, English teaching in China, laid a particular stress on grammar, but largely ignore the social environment of the target language especially the culture difference of the language. To the language cultural, teachers usually make a casual remark in passing or simply just leave it alone. Let alone to cultivate their culture consciousness in the class. The result in students is the lower understand of those cultures. At the same time, “sit-for-exam” trap English teaching into a vicious circle and seriously separate itself from the purpose of learn in order to practice. This has lead teaching, learning and using break away from each other. The teaching purpose drifts off cause lots of problems in teaching methods. One of them is “force-feed” method which is a one way and antiquated teaching model. Those teachers standing on the stage spare no trouble to repeat the new words, grammar, sentence structure and skills to get higher marks in exams. The students meanwhile were sitting there to accept all these passivity. There are no good for gaining students’ interests to study initiatively. The other one is in both syllabus and teaching material were design to sit for exams. That is to say students learn to learn and teachers teach for teach. Without culture information and the “force-feed”, students learn nothing but “silent English”.
4.2 Culture teaching in China
(1) The characteristic of the content of the current English teaching material of language learning is as followed: Culture is the background of all the lessons, teachers regard training students’ language ability as the main point in the class which include listening, speaking, reading and writing skills, meanwhile they put emphasis on accumulating vocabulary and recite the grammar and sentence structures. Among them the culture issue is not only include main English countries, historical geography, local condition and customs, traditional customs, life style, literature and art, behavioral norm, but also include the material of language taking Chinese culture as background of a certain amount. This kind of content is not leading us to learn culture but have to learn it with or without purpose. Through this we will unconsciously compare different kinds of culture and realized the difference between it, cross-culture communication ability will train progressively. (2) The teachers still did not realize the importance of culture teaching in language teaching. Currently, the exam-oriented education is still having a big influence on the teachers in the both the secondary and higher education seriously. In most school “teacher-center” is still working as the main trend in classes. So the teachers play a very important role on this. But sadly we found that many or even most teachers are habitually put emphasis on training students’ language abilities, some of them spend most of the times in pushing students to enumerate the knowledge of grammars and new words in the classes. Some teachers, however, focus on cultivate students’ reading ability, anything but culture consciousness of students’. They pay little attention on explaining the culture connotations of the lessons; ignore the culture issues, social state, and culture background of the English countries, etc. As a result, students in this kind of language leaning system can only stay on the top layer of the target language, without culture insert, they can not reach to the deeper understanding of the target language. Students can still use the language they have learned but they have not mastered the language totally in communication ability of it. In this case, students are good at language ability but they often cause themselves problems because of the 原文请+QQ32,49114辣.文^论,文'网 misunderstanding of the cultures. American foreign language teaching expert Winston Bareback said: “It is the best method of training the fool fluently of language to the teaching method of knowledge its language without understanding its culture”. The consequence can be really serious if we did not take care of it. (3) The students in school do not have a very high artistic appreciation. And that’s how an awkward cross-culture communication pattern appeared: “language ability+ communication skills+ Chinese custom”. This usually happened in the classes with their teachers and classmates because they do not use language to communicate with each other outside of the classroom in their daily life. There’s no English speaking environment at all. What’s more, the teachers play the most important role in this teaching activity, ignore culture teaching in most of the time which lead the students directly to a wrong way to understand the target language. The Chinese teachers who teach English are often think in Chinese and express in English. This is how “Chinglish” appeared.