英语教学中的跨文化交际

英语教学中的跨文化交际

[摘 要] 近年来，随着我国改革开放的发展和我国与国际间的经济、科技、文化交流日益频繁，人们越来越重视外国文化问题。同时，我们也逐渐认识到了了解外国文化在对外交往中的重要性。在教育领域中，外语教学也渐渐重视对学生交际能力的培养。然而，对许多老师而言，文化教学还是一个较新的概念，从跨文化角度对英语教学进行研究探讨在目前还是个新领域。我们必须认识到交际能力的培养是外语教学的主要目标，培养学生跨文化交际的技能是中学外语教学要达到的一个目标。本文的第一段介绍了文化及特征，也提到跨文化交际和其重要性，指出跨文化知识的学习在外语学习中的重要性。本文在第二段主要讨论了跨文化教学的现状，突出提到了现存的几个问题。本文的第三章着重探讨在外语教学中如何培养学生的跨文化交际能力。主要包括跨文化交际教学的原则和方法。
[关键词] 跨文化交际；文化教学；英语教学

Cross-cultural Communication in English Language Teaching

[Abstract] Since last century, because of reforming and opening policy, many people, especially young people go abroad to get a better job or get further education and so on. Besides, many foreigners are curious about our country. Consequently, people come to realize that if we known little about cross-cultural communication, there will be many conflicts. Some experts suggest that today’s English teaching should emphasize intercultural communication. Learners ought to know not only grammar or words, but should learn cultural knowledge. If not, they will meet many difficulties while they communicate with foreigners. Therefore, it is important to introduce this kind of knowledge while teaching. In this thesis, the first part talks about some basic concepts, and the second part, talk about the ways of culture teaching, including some methods and principles. The last part mainly talk about the problems of culture teaching and try to give some suggestions about improving culture teaching.
The aim of this paper is to emphasize the importance of culture teaching during foreign language teaching. Culture teaching is necessary for all of us, it can make it possible for learners to prevent miscommunication from occurring in intercultural communications.
[Key Words] Cross-cultural communication; Cultural teaching; English teaching
1. Introduction

Because of the development of the transportation, communication and economy, the world seems to be getting smaller，people with different cultures keep closer contact.  It’s an urgent task for English teachers to master how to make teaching of English meet the needs of social and economic development. The concept of foreign language teaching in Chinese school should be changed from stressing the vocabulary and grammar to cultivating the students’ communicative competence. So, cultural teaching in foreign language teaching becomes an important part. But culture teaching is a very complex procedure. Li Guoliang argues, “The ignorance of communicative culture will affect the quality of foreign language teaching and the students’ ability to use the language as well. ”

2. Something about Cross-culture
2.1 On culture  
Culture is defined as the deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs values, attitudes, meanings, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. Culture also refers to history, geography, local conditions and customs, tradition customs, the way of life, literature and art, code of conduct and value outlook.
These are five characteristics of culture that will enable us to see how these characteristics influence communication
First, culture is not innate but learned. From infancy on, members of a culture learn their patterns of behavior and ways of thinking until they have become internalized.
Second, culture is transmissible. It always transmitted from one generation to anther.
Third, culture is dynamic. They can produce change through the mechanisms of invention and diffusion
Fourth, culture is selective. Every culture represents a limited choice of behavior patterns from the infinite patterns of human experience
Fifth, culture is ethnocentric. Ethnoentrism might well be the characteristic that most directly related to cross-culture.
.2.2 On cross-culture and the importance of learning cross-cultural knowledge
Those characteristics are the common features of most countries’ culture. We know that different country has different culture, and has its own character. As the development of the society, technology, economy, and trade, cross-communication is necessary for every country. Since the culture of different country is individual, if we pay no attention to each other’s culture, there will be many conflicts, even some trifling matters. Many failures exist during communication.  For example, eye contact. Eye contact is an important body language. In conversation with people who know each other, the customs of English-speaking countries demand that there should be eye contact. Which applies to both the speaker and the listener. For either one not to look at the other people could imply a number of things, among which are fear, contempt, uneasiness, guilt, and indifference. However, in China, Japan, and Korea, people are expected to avoid prolonged eye contact. In particular, when a child converses with his or her parents or grandparents, he or she is not allowed to stare at them too much.  Thus if an American is always gazing at a Chinese in the conversation, the Chinese may consider the American is aggressive，threatening and disrespectful whereas the Chinese is considered suspicious and dishonest if the Chinese always avoids eye contact. Besides, the American may think the Chinese has no interest to talk with him.
 Another example is greetings. Thanks to cultural value differences, greeting behaviors involve different subjects. American people  tend to talk about weather， life，work, and so on after greeting one another, to manage to find out common subjects. However, such a greeting behavior doesn’t go for every culture. In Chinese culture, for example, people usually begin a conversation by either “Have you eaten?” or “Where are you going”. And these greetings are very common and accepted in China, but if Americans are greeted with such questions, communication failure will take place. If asked the former question, Americans will misunderstand that it could indicate an invitation to a meal. As far as the latter question is concerned, Americans will consider that it interfere their privacy. The natural reaction of Americans to this greeting would most likely be “It’s none of your business”. This greeting, for most English-speaking people, is considered as a taboo.
Now, let’s come to the definition of cross-cultural communication. Cross-cultural communication means communication between people whose culture perceptions and symbol systems are distinct enough to alter the communication event.
If a person socialized into one culture is living in or visiting another culture, obedience to the norms of host culture probably is effortful and transgression may be reflexive. The violation of any norm brings some form of sanction on the person committing the violation. The sanctions vary from a disapproving glance to the loss of life.
Therefore, cross-cultural knowledge is important when we communicate with foreigners. We should realize that when we teach foreign language, teaching cross- culture is indispensable.
2.3 The relationship between language teaching and culture teaching
We know that traditional English teaching mostly emphasize vocabulary, grammar, phonetics and so on. Its aim is to develop students’ ability of listening, writing, speaking, or teach them to make correct sentences.
In fact, languages’ function is not so .We learn language in order to meet the need of practice，to communicate with foreigners effectively. In addition, the English Curriculum Standard also highlights the cross-cultural teaching, as it play an important role in effective international communication.
Therefore, language teaching and culture teaching are inseparable. Now I would like to try to talk something about the relationship between language teaching and culture teaching.
Language teaching and culture teaching are inseparable, so, we cannot teach language without teaching culture. As a matter of fact, they are inter-related. In foreign language classes, if the language does not reflect the foreign culture, or the language is taught without relating to its culture, we may consider that he/she learning another language but represent his own culture. On the other hand, if we teach other countries culture but don’t teach its language is similarly unwise.
Language teaching and cultural teaching are not conflict to each other in classes. We must believe that either native language or foreign language can play a role in the classes. Teachers usually use native language to interpret the foreign culture to the learners. Besides, if we used the comparison ways to interpret foreign culture, learners will get a well master.
In a word, foreign language teaching and foreign cultural teaching support and depend on each other, and they make up of two basic inter-relative elements in classes. But, in order to cultivate the learners’ language awareness, it is necessary to put great emphasis on the language teaching, such as pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. At the same time, we should develop the learners’ culture awareness by paying much attention to culture teaching. Once learners have the culture awareness, they will understand that culture is different from one another and they will know what should do in different specific situation.
For these reasons, language study requires us not only understand the language, but also gain the ability to communicate in any cultural communicative situations. In our country, most schools take English as the target foreign in school should try to make every students have the communication ability when they are in backgrounds different from our own.
3. Problems of culture teaching nowadays    
3.1 The present situation of culture instruction
Among the teachers, 75% develop cultural awareness and cultural competence by means of adding background knowledge in English lessons, while only 33% of the of the students approve this practice. This shows that most teachers prefer the transmission knowledge of cultural when dealing with the teaching of culture. And they control what contents to be added and when to be added, whereas, learners become the passive recipients of the knowledge. But the statistics also show that this practice isn’t popular with the students. Another 33%of them think the way of teaching culture is to engage in classroom activities, which they will gain culture experience. They are expected to learn cultural knowledge by doing from the perspective of pragmatics. And in the process of carrying out various kinds of activities, they learn how to behave in a specific situation. In this way the focus of classroom practice shifts from the teacher to the students. The students become the center and active participants. However, there is a lower rate (20%) of the teachers who hold this belief.
Nowadays, there are some flaws about ways of culture teaching. As it is known to us, some pupils’ communicative competence is far behind their linguistic competence. The reason is that teachers put great emphasis on the teaching of English phonetics, vocabulary and grammar and make English learning purely training of languages skills, but take little notice on culture backgrounds. They overlook the culture teaching.
Even though some teachers recognize the importance of teaching culture, the common way they deal with culture teaching is to add some cultural background knowledge or reference to its relative dialogues or texts in order to make the classes interesting and expand the students’ vision of the culture. For example, when teacher deal with a certain passage, they will give some information about the author, the works or its main characters and his/her lifetime, introducing some of his or her other famous works, or talking about the general idea or the theme of the passage, especially when it was an adaptation or simplification of a novel. Sometimes those kinds of knowledge are transmitted in Chinese either by the teacher or the students.
Besides, in the process of learning and practicing, learners have just cognitively known about the differences and tried to memorize and reproduce similar dialogues. They seldom asked to find the reasons for these differences and discuss the similarities between the two cultures.
3.2 Problems with teacher
As we have mentioned above, there are many problems during the process of  cross-cultural leaning and teaching. Teacher should pay enough attention to them. But there are some problems about teachers themselves.
3.2.1 Objective problems
(ⅰ) Traditional concepts
China is a country with thousands of year civilization. It has a certain concept of education. For examples, the teachers’ responsibility is to pass on knowledge, to explain texts and to give answers to controversial questions. The right way of learning is to review. Recitation is one of the most correct ways of reviewing. Learning means the accumulation of knowledge. These concepts of education still have a strong influence on the modern styles of teaching and learning language, including English. In fact, we must learn how to use the language in its social context, for every nation has its own unique culture patter and a language is a carrier of a culture. On this problem, teachers ought to change the view about teaching. The reason we have mentioned above, in present day, it is not enough to have just knowledge of the language learned. We must learn how to use the language in its social context. In a word, teachers should realize the importance of culture teaching and practice.

(ⅱ)Time  limitation 
Another reason for teachers’ affecting their concentration on culture teaching lies in the time limitation. Most of the class time has been spent in learning vocabulary, structures and consolidation in order to memorize those linguistic elements and reproduce them, and many English teachers have too many classes, examinations for students make English teachers very busy and tired. These give teachers little time and opportunity to learn and conduct research, though they knew that teaching research could help a lot to their English teaching. Teachers are not sure about how to master new teaching approaches, or how to cultivate students’ communicative competence.
(ⅲ)Financial problem
Besides, some English teachers are unable to devote themselves to teaching because of financial problem, they are even eager to change their profession.
3.2.2 Subjective problems
(ⅰ) Limited  experience
Teachers in China are usually considered to have limited experience with the target culture, and in fact few teachers can offer some experience in foreign language classes. Most of them are not qualified to deal with culture effectively and confidently because they haven’t enough necessary knowledge. On the one hand, most of English teacher are trained in the Chinese environment. On the other hand, they seldom read books on language teaching theory. Therefore, it is not surprising that they are not capable of dealing with the matter effectively.
(ⅱ) Over-confident
On the other hand, there is a prevalent phenomenon in China that a great number of English teachers tend to be over-confident about their competence and performance, arguing that they already have enough knowledge to teach English. These kinds of makes them neglect their development. For these teachers, it is important to change their attitude. To solve this problem teachers should realize that his/her own development is the process of lifelong in the teaching profession; it involves many activities, so that to achieve personal and professional growth for teachers. Teachers’ development must be a vital component in teacher education. In order to improve teaching and become a qualified English teacher, he/she should master relevant disciplines such as Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Social linguistics, Psychology, pedagogy, second language and language teaching. In some countries, including the Netherlands and the, studying and working and try to gain abroad the high level of language proficiency among foreign language teachers.
These problems indicate that the English teachers’ foreign language culture and quality cannot nearly meet the requirements of modern English teaching. We really have a very long way to go.
4. Principles and ways of culture teaching
4.1 Principles for culture teaching
Culture is important for learners, and cultural teaching and cross-cultural communication are inseperatable. Teaching culture will help us have an effective cross-cultural communication, on the other hand, effective cross-cultural communication can offer us a good cultural knowledge, so we must pay enough attention to it. First of all, let’s talk some principles about it. Maybe they can help us get a effective learning or teaching.
(ⅰ) Principle  1
Culture acquisition should not be restricted to the learning of formal or ‘high’ culture, but it should mainly include the learning of everyday or ‘popular’ culture, which is more connected to our social environments. In dealing with these aspects the instructor should not be restricted to just presenting factors. Culture learning should provide learners with chances to research the other cultures by themselves, so that they will obtain tools which will be useful in coming across a new culture, so that the learning of some knowledge will not ended in stereotypical perspective in learners.
(ⅱ) Principle  2
Culture acquisition should be highly concerned with the aspects of verbal and nonverbal communication such as common words and phrases, gestures and behaviors.
In dealing with these aspects of culture, the instruction should not be restricted to just presenting the norm, but should provide learners with chance to research the other cultures by themselves. The instruction should also provide learners with chance to know the backgrounds or social rules which underline the words, phrases, gestures, and behaviors, so that the learning of them will give the learners with some knowledge, perspectives and skills which enable them to cope with a new situation.
(ⅲ) Principle  3
Culture teaching should include the learning or activities which enable students to change their own stereotypes, and also enable them to engage in an actual intercultural communication in terms of a larger identify which she or he and the other person share, so that the communication will be more interpersonal.
(ⅳ) Principle  4
Culture acquisition should not be limited to the treatment of national level culture, so that learner will acquire perspective diversity towards others.
(ⅴ) Principle  5
Culture learning should not be equated with the learning of the culture of English speaking countries and peoples, nor the adaptation of it. It should deal with varieties of countries and peoples, so that learners will appreciate the value of culture diversity.
(ⅵ) Principle  6
Culture learning should place high priority on the learning of the culture of learners’ own country and people
Place a correct attitude to the native culture and target culture. We should learn culture. But this does not mean to change our native culture.
(vii) Principle 7
Make it interesting. Of course, the culture is interesting to teachers, so they may presume that it will be interesting for their students.
(viii) Principle 8
Don’t try to cover everything. Culture is enormous. It consists of all the institutions, all the behaviors, in fact all the man-made aspects of a very large group of non-homogeneous people. All what we can do is provide some pathways to enter into learning more about the culture.
(iⅹ) Principle  9
The target language should be the primary vehicle used to teach culture. Of all the elements of the target culture, the target language is the most typically—the most readily available. Its authentic use in the classroom from the beginning of instruction is therefore the primary culture objective

4.2 Elements of improving culture teaching and learning

4.2.1 Patterns of teaching
One pattern is the ordinary steps while teaching. During the course of teaching, the teachers should explain the content of culture knowledge step by step according to the students’ age, characteristics and the ability of understanding. At the beginning stage of learning English, the teacher should make students learn about the culture in English speaking countries and understand the differences and similarities between Chinese culture and foreign culture. The culture knowledge in English speaking countries involved in the teaching should be closely related to students’ daily life and arouse the interest of their learning English. At the second stage of learning English, the teacher should help students to widen their outlook by extending the students’ limits of getting in touch with foreign cultures in order to make them improve their sensibility and ability to tell the difference between Chinese and foreign culture. As a result, the students; intercultural communication competence is improved.
The other pattern is a friendly classroom atmosphere. The most important way for teachers to carry out culture teaching in teaching is to create a friendly negotiable atmosphere. There is no threat to learners, meeting learners’ affective needs, accepting all kinds of opinions and can tolerate the mistakes learners make, encourage learners to learn to have more confidence and enjoyment in what they are doing, develop an environment that will motivate learners to participate in classroom activities, working cooperatively on group tasks. As for task, situation role play is a good idea. This play can show culture different in age, gender, ethnic background or social class. For example, we can create a situation of a meeting between a Chinese students and English-speaking students.
4.2.2 Methods of teaching culture
Intercultural communication is a big issue, which is not easy for both teachers and students to understand and realize. For successful cultural teaching, we suggest doing the following:
(1) Teach culture differences. Teachers should directly address the similarities and peculiarities between the source culture and the target culture. This can be done through the comparison of the two cultures.
(2) Provide opportunities for students to use the language in situational conversations. While introducing the students play a real-life role and practice their everyday language use according to the varied situation.
(3) Make full use of pictures, films, TV, computers and other audio-visual aids to make the teaching lively and interesting. Explore to the full the opportunities for students with the target culture information.
(4) Induce students to read literal works, which are vivid and abundant material to understand the character, the psychological state, culture characteristics, convention, and social relationships. Reading newspaper is also the direct path.
(5) Cultural Islands
From the first day of class, teacher should have prepared a cultural island in their classroom. Posters, pictures, maps, signs, many of many kinds are essential in helping students develop a mental image. Assigning students foreign names from the first day can heighten students’ interest. Short presentations on a topic of interest with appropriate pictures or slides add to this mental image. Start students off by making them aware of the influence of various foreign cultures in this country.
(6) Make full use of textbooks. Present reading materials concerning the target culture. In textbook, teaching, special attention should be paid to teaching the culture of the English speaking countries, such as British and American cultural background and customs so that students can gain more cultural information and perform appropriately according to different contexts.
(7) Provide contextual support for the language being used.
(8) (8) Deliberately give more classroom directions and organizational advice to students, and give more explicit directions about homework and assignments.
(9) Be aware of your students development level, when selecting themes or concepts to present. At first, learning activities should be clear and specific in lower levels, gradually, becoming more complex than the level of the student increases. There are a variety of children’s fiction which presents concepts like similarities, differences and prejudice which can be used at lower levels. At upper levels fiction and biographies can be used to present the more complicated ideas. Try to connect the unfamiliar with the familiar, the known with the unknown.
(10) Obtain constant feedback as to the level of a student’s language.
(11) Use plenty of repetition, summaries, and restatement to ensure that students understand the teacher’s directions.
(12) Provide a role model which students can emulate.
(13) Correct errors indirectly. Teachers ensure that the corrections are built into their language to make a quick and immediate impact.
(14) Use plenty of ways in both general learning tasks and in language learning tasks.
(15) Use varied methods to check the understanding level of the students.
(16) Be prepared to explore the links between language and culture in your own classes.
(17) Be enthusiastic. As a teacher you need to be aware of the value of learning a second language in terms of its contribution to developing cultural aware and a range of other cognitive and vocational benefits. Your attitude will influence the attitudes of the children in the class and their parents.
(18) Be corporative. The more closely you work with the other students, encourage learners to draw on their own background knowledge and make cross-cultural comparisons, the more successful it will be.
Beside, Chinese teachers should take advantage of foreign teachers. Foreign teachers are rich in knowledge, idiomatic English, strong teaching culture context, full of wit and humor, longing to understand much more about Chinese culture. This attitude can have a great influence on students, and increased their desire of learning English well and knowing about the culture of English-speaking countries. Teachers can make full use of such rare chances and consult foreign teachers that they are according to the calendar, then all of the teachers and students can try their best to create all kinds of conditions to speak them imitatively —Action speak louder than words. 
For example, we once tried to spend Christmas and Hallowmas with all foreign teachers together in our school .The students were very interested and active in the activities， and such experiences can have impressed them strongly and forever.
Teachers should encourage students to communicate with foreign teachers and some other foreigners in and out of school. Students and foreign teachers can have classes, play games and take part in many kinds of activities together. Communicating with foreigners can provide students with the real cultural context in which English is used actually and stimulate students to learn English well including knowing about foreign culture.
As the success of many activities depends on good organization and on the students knowing exactly what they are to do. A teacher is thus mainly an organizer, whose work is different from administrator of a school system. But the teacher, like any other organizer, works primarily with people, and his task and responsibility are to create situations in which people can do their best and achieve their best.
Since teachers are key roles during culture teaching, they must play a positive role in helping the students to develop intercultural communicative competence and increase the students’ chances to succeeding in both language learning. It is not an expendable skill tacked on to the teaching of speaking, listening, writing and reading. It is always in some background. Lack of intercultural competence will limit the students’ ability to make sense of the world around them, and lead to failure in using English for communication across-culture.
4.2.3 Have a correct attitude towards textbooks 
Foreign language textbooks can be analyzed as have important functions in the teaching of culture at several levels. A textbook can be a teacher, in the sense that it contains materials that are intended to instruct students directly about English-speaking culture. A textbook is also a map that gives an overview of a structured program of linguistic and culture elements, showing teachers and learners the ground to be covered and summarizing the route taken in previous lessons. Many textbooks show the culture topics. A textbook is also a trainer for teachers. Textbooks are seen as embodying current research and theory. Teachers can learn from them. Nowadays, some schools have adapted some textbooks from abroad on the base of the unified textbooks, such books more and more emphasize the importance of culture and fuse cultural contents about relevant target language countries, such as art, education, history, literature, music, politics, religion, everyday life, social customs and value outlook. We need to realize that there still have some problematic books, which use target language to describe happenings and activities about Chinese culture. Here, language is divorced from its target culture. This kind of books need reformed.
In culture teaching, we should select some proper textbooks published abroad, or we can make use of some authentic materials. The authentic materials refer to materials come from everyday life abroad. These authentic materials include some culture backgrounds such as American customs and taboos. They can help students to learn some typical background knowledge of another culture.
Since textbook doesn’t mean everything, what is important is to ask what they are good for, and how they should be used so that the advantage outweighs their disadvantages.
In addition, teaching culture and language by means of newspaper and journals is a recommendable technique. As these publications are capable of fulfilling information, advising, helping, and entertaining, teachers often employ them to enliven their classes.
Byram’s research said: As far as cultural information is concerned on all the classes observed, the textbook provided a potential core of information and in fact teachers relied on the textbook for cultural information a great deal. Only on the topics included in the textbook were covered, and other information was integrated with the topic currently being studied from the textbooks.
4.2.4 Ways of improving cross-culture communication
(ⅰ) Culture  awareness
    Culture awareness is the term we have used to describe sensitivity to the impact of culturally---induced behavior on language use and communication. It including two qualities: one is awareness of one’s own culture, the other is awareness of the culture.
Unfortunately, in China, cross-cultural communication errors can be found from time to time. In English teaching, culture factor needs to be taken seriously.
To cultivate students’ intercultural communication we need first to arouse their cultural awareness. Because of different cultural background, life experience, profession, sex, education, even age, character, people may have different modes of interaction. People learn to think, feel, behave and strive for what their culture considers proper. These means there might not be the same as what is intended by the speaker. If we are aware of this, we can avoid ethnocentricity, and can have better communication with people all over the world.
(ⅱ)The importance of raising culture awareness
Speakers of a foreign language often have the experience of making careless mistakes which may cause get angry, may be embarrassing and may arouse hostility from native speaker. Often such mistakes occur even though the application of the linguistic rules of grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation is correct. These mistakes are culture errors but occur because of not knowing or choosing the appropriate style, and manner to use for effective communication.
(ⅲ) The development of sensitiveness to culture differences
There are four stages in the development of the sensitiveness to culture differences. The first, one can make out the obvious, superficial culture characteristics. In other word, he will find them interesting and exotic. The second, one can judge the delicate meaningful cultural characteristics that are quite different from his own. Usually he will feel them incredible or hard to accept .The third, one can accept the cultural characteristics after rational analysis. The fourth, one can be in the other peoples’ shoes and appreciate the cultural characteristics. In other words, the first three stage can be understood, and the fourth empathy. [11]
To achieve the first three goals, the following approaches are recommended.
（1）The textbook should contain the western customs, habits, hobbies, and living modes.
（2）Communications with the native speakers are encouraged from those of China’s various ethnic groups.
（3）The students can discuss the western customs different from those of China’s customs various ethnic groups.
（4）Make full use of English videos and films. All these materials are welcome.
Some stories, essays and screenplays should be read and noted, about cultural details should be made.
（5）Lectures about culture should be held, if possible. At the same time, experts can tackle the problem with more examples, both deep and broad.
(ⅳ) The development of empathy
In order to communication effectively, you need a deep degree of empathy, that is to be able to understand the other person’s affective and cognitive states.
Empathy involves relativism and flexibility, which knowledge alone cannot consist.
Teachers can create good classroom environment where students tolerate and appreciate different norms by bringing up students’ empathy. In China, we always emphasize collectivism instead of individualism. But in English class, we advocate differences, to encourage students to understand each other. [12]
4.2.5Improving assessment of culture learning
In further strengthening the integration of culture with language learning, the assessment of culture learning is a very necessary and important part of the whole project of teaching language and culture; otherwise, culture learning might probably be regard again as something of secondary importance. This issue has also been recognized and supported by many scholars. Students should realize that they will be tested over culture information presented. However, the assessments of culture learning in China have been quite problematic. Byram and Cain in discussion of what to test and how to test describes the following items:
—The “content” to be test: knowledge, attitude, and behavioral skill.
—The ability to investigate: Since we had focused on ethnographic techsniques, these should be best in principle also
—The techniques for testing: oral and written assessment by using the role-play, using the essay.
—The criteria for assessment and the determination of levels of competence.
This model of culture tests seems to be workable if the body of knowledge associated with the mentioned areas to be tested can be taught in the classroom. We recommend the techniques of testing suggested by Byram and Cain, because they are practical and manageable.[11]
We will combine culture tests with linguistic competences tests according to the Chinese context of foreign language teaching, English examinations in Chinese secondary school and college are made up of two parts, listening and writing isolated sentences or short passages that carry culture information such as value, and beliefs can all be used as testing materials in both listening and written test.[13]
In brief, a culture test is very important to ensuring systematic and consistent teaching development.
4.2.6The goals of culture teaching
According to the Tomalin and Stemples, the teaching of culture has the following goals:
(1) To help students to develop an understanding of the fact that all people show cultural-conditioned behaviors.
(2) To help students to develop an understanding that social variables such as age, sex, social class, and place of residence influence the ways in which people speak and behave.
(3) To help students to become more aware of conventional behaviors in common situations in the target culture.
(4) To help students to increase their awareness of the culture connotations of words a phrases in the target language.
(5) To help students to develop the ability to evaluate and refine generalizations about the target culture in terms of supporting evidence.
(6) To help students to develop the necessary skills to locate and organize information about the target culture.
(7) To stimulate students’ intellectual curiosity about the target culture, and to encourage empathy towards its people.
At any rate, the aim of teaching culture is to increase students’ awareness and to develop their curiosity towards the target culture and their own. These comparisons, of course are not meant to underestimate foreign culture but to enrich students’ experience and the sensitivities them to cultural diversity.[14]

Conclusion
This paper mainly talks about cross-cultural communication in foreign language teaching in China. In the first chapter, we talk about some basic concepts, the importance of learn cross-culture and discuss the relationship between language teaching and cultural teaching. Next part is talk about the problems of culture teaching nowadays. According to these problems, we explore some culture teaching principles and methods to improve culture teaching. This is the last part.
Culture is communication. Thus culture acquisition should provide learners with chances transfigurate of their viewpoints about the interaction of communication and culture, so that they will successfully cope with a new situation. Only learners have achieved the diversity of perspectives, not in the stereotypical or prejudiced perspectives, the intercultural communication can be more interpersonal.
In intercultural communication settings, Chinese learners in culture instruction should keep an open mind: we should try to avoid the prejudiced culture stereotypes over the other cultures and our own. Especially, we should put higher focus on the learning of our own Chinese culture. Another key point is becoming awareness of our own culture bottom lines. We must learn what our own culture line is ― the values where we are can negotiate, but we cannot compromise. We can allow others to be different, and respect their differences as they respect ours.
Though the culture teaching is a very complicated and difficult part to deal with, the educators and teachers involved in language education should make great efforts to carry out this part thoroughly. This determines much whether the effective cross-cultural communication can be proceeded smoothly between China and the world.

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