Teaching Culture in China's TEFL Classroom

Keywords

culture studies; teaching of culture; textual culture studies; British culture; American culture

Abstract

This paper focuses on how British and American culture can be taught to students of English within the foreign language curriculum at the university level in China. Taking into account the goals, the vastness of the subject, students' lack of background knowledge, the syllabus design and teaching method of culture studies must be subordinated to the overall aim of TEFL. However, the current practice of teaching British and American culture to non-native students of English tends to fall into some pitfalls in that students are bombarded with excessive cultural information on various aspects of the two English-speaking cultures. This paper will examine how the teaching of culture can be integrated into the learning of the English language by proposing an alternative approach to culture studies in TEFL classroom, namely the textual culture studies. In addition, a three-step method of teaching culture studies will be proposed and particularly the teaching of American primary belief of work will be exemplified to illustrate culture studies within the foreign language curriculum must be fundamentally different from similar ones in other disciplines or curriculums.

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Chunrong Wang
PY  - 2019/08
DA  - 2019/08
TI  - Teaching Culture in China's TEFL Classroom
BT  - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Arts, Design and Contemporary Education (ICADCE 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 695
EP  - 701
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/125916187
ID  - Wang2019/08
ER  -