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Developing students’ cultural awareness through foreign language teaching



Author(s)

KUANG Jin-feng

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DOI:10.17265/1539-8072/2007.12.017

Foreign Languages School Affiliated to Yunnan University, Kunming 650091, China

We live in an age of changes. And these changes in science, technology, economy, political systems, and immigration patterns, especially the emergence of Internet, have created a world in which we increasingly interact with people from different cultures. The levels of students’ cultural awareness toward the target language (English) have a profound influence on the foreign language teaching (English) practice and performance. Obviously linguistic knowledge alone is not enough to secure successful interactions with native speakers in cross cultural communications. Cultural mistakes are worse than linguistic ones because they tend to cause misjudgments, or ill feelings between native and foreign speakers. Therefore, this paper mainly discusses the relationship between culture and language, explaining cultural awareness, providing some principles of cultural knowledge teaching and some techniques to develop students’ cultural awareness through foreign language (English) teaching in high schools.

cultural awareness; foreign language (English) teaching; cross cultural communication; cultural knowledge