Ways of culture training
The above analysis of cross-cultural awareness implies that culture training would extremely be helpful when people from two different cultures interact. So in ELT, the teachers should provide more opportunities of culture training for the students to widen their cultural horizon and increase their cross-cultural awareness. Scholars and experts have suggested many ways of culture training. The most effective way is through experience. Living in a different culture for many years is a very efficient way to learn about it, but obviously this is expensive and often impractical. However, we can learn another culture by interacting with people from that culture in “controlled” or laboratory situations. For example, we may have interpersonal contact with native speakers of English in China, or correspond with friends from foreign culture, etc. Direct contact with the native speakers of English is a shortcut to understand English culture. Students can benefit from both the expressions in conversation with the foreigners and the kinesic or paralinguistic phenomena of the foreign speakers. Through interpersonal contact with foreigners, the students will experience and learn the nonverbal communication, through which the students can learn what books do not tell directly. So teachers should offer more opportunities for students to communicate with the English native speakers. Another beneficial way is accumulating cultural background information through reading the original texts, clippings from newspapers and magazines, brochures, etc. William F. Marquardt (1967, 1969) views literature as a vehicle for creating cross-cultural empathy. He makes such a general statement: “The surest way to teach empathy for culturally different problems is through literature. Literature vivifies and highlights the ways people of a particular culture live. But more important, it enables the reader to experience how they feel.” (Marquardt, 1969: 133) Activities like talks and lectures on the concept of culture and on differences in customs and habits, seeing English films and watching videotapes, tasting some of the food, seeing native artwork, learning songs and dances, etc. not only can increase cultural background information but also can help to develop greater empathy on the part of the learners toward the foreign culture and perhaps encourage the growth of the emotions and feelings similar to those of the target group. So in order to create cross-cultural atmosphere and develop students’ cross-cultural communication competence, teachers can organize various kinds of contextualized activities to enrich their cultural experience and help them to apply their cultural knowledge into parties on festivals such as Christmas Day and All Saints’ Day, English corner every week, decoration of classroom, etc. not only activate the whole class but also initiate students’ interest and enthusiasm to learn English.
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