English Cross-Cultural Awareness Essay

With growing globalization, English has become an international language used widely across the world, which results in greater demand for the talents with cross-cultural communicative competence in this diversified global community. Meanwhile, the purpose of English teaching has changed, not only to foster a native speaker but an international person who has cross-cultural communicative competence. Therefore, it is imperative to cultivate students' cross-cultural awareness in the stage of basic education. Namely, as an English teacher, we should attach more importance to cultivation of students' cross-cultural awareness in English teaching. As is known to all, like any other language, English consists of speech sound, grammatical structure

In the beginning of cultural teaching, many American people had gone abroad for further study or visited other counties. Moreover, Kennedy administration had sent thousands of peace squads to the rest of the world, and for these people, it was inevitable to study culture of other countries. Consequently, the need for cultural learning had soared. In 1960, Foreign Language Teaching Northeast Conference regarded cultural teaching as the theme of the meeting. These early activities marked that culture, as an important part of foreign language teaching gained acceptance in the field of foreign language education. In the research phase of cultural teaching, Lado came up with the theory of Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis to comprehend the native culture and target culture in his book Linguistic Across Culture. He believed that second language learners depend on their native language that they have mastered. And they often apply the form, meaning and culture of their native language into their second language acquisition. Besides, the father of the cross-cultural communication, Hall vividly demonstrated the necessity of cultural teaching in foreign language education in his classics---The Silent Language, The Hidden Dimension and Beyond Culture. In the third stage, CARLA (Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition) had established in 1991, with an