Cultivation of Cross-cultural competence in language teaching

秦韶红

Key words:  culture, language

As the global development of science and technology and economy, cross-cultural communication is no longer a new phenomena. It has already become an important part in life for people to communicate with others from different nations, regions and with different cultural background. As a multi culture exchange platform, China is in an urgent need of talents who are with cross-cultural communicative competence. To learn a language is not only to learn it as a tool to understand passively but also to communicative actively.  Therefore, language teaching is faced with new challenges. It is high time that we language teachers thought about how to cultivate students’ cross-cultural communicative competence.

When one communicates with others who have a different culture with new values and new expectations, different communication styles can create conflicts and confusions.  The strong feelings of discomfort, fear, or insecurity which a person may have when they enter another culture are known as culture shock.  When a person moves to live in a foreign country, they may have a period of culture shock until they become familiar with the new culture.  That means that one has to adjust to different ways of perceiving and acting in communication when he enters a new culture.  Society and language are mutually indispensable.  Although the faculty of language acquisition and language use is innate and inherited, every individual’s language is acquired by man as a member of society.  He is brought up in a society whose culture exerts considerable influence on him. His language is influenced and shaped by the culture of that society.  In a broad sense language is a symbolic representation of a people and it comprises their historical and cultural backgrounds as well as their approach to life and their ways of living and thinking.  A common view of culture is that of something learned, transmitted, passed communication, the participants always choose a kind of means of speaking according to a certain cultural model.  Their social model decides their communicative behaviour.  The social knowledge produces communicative interaction. 

   Language is the soul of the country and people who speak it.  If language is taught only as a tool, very little culture will be taught along with the language.  The command of the language is superficial.  Learners will not be able to sense the power and the essence of a language because language is culture.  When a person decides to learn a language, English, as an example, he or she is not merely absorbing the linguistics of the language.  What he or she is taking in includes all the preconceptions about the language.  Most languages come with some cultural associations attached.  By speaking the language, therefore, one automatically (to a greater or lesser extent) connects oneself with the culture of that language.  To speak a language well, one has to be able to think in that language, and thought is extremely powerful.  A person’s mind is in a sense the center of his identity, so if a person thinks in one language in order to speak it, one might say that he has almost taken on an identity of that language speaking country. In my viewpoints, the more one knows about the language, the more eager he will be to know about the culture, history and people of the country. Vice versa, one can learn the language better when one knows more about the culture.  His cross-cultural communicative competence will therefore be improved. 

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