Learning a foreign language well does not simply mean mastering its pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. In fact, the learning of a language is inseparable from the learning of its culture. It shows that students not only should grasp vocabularies, grammar and pronunciation,but also properly grasp the relationship between language teaching and culture understanding. It's clear that language teaching is indeed culture teaching. It is necessary and urgent to teach not only cultural knowledge information but cultural communication information as well. Having plenty of knowledge of cultural perspectives, cultural contents and cultural practices, an individual can learn a foreign language to a desirable height and level. Briefly, cultural knowledge is a starting point, cultural awareness is the link between cultural knowledge and cultural understanding, and the final objective is to improve the language acquisition of English-learners through culture teaching.
Key words: culture; teaching; learning; approaches; learning strategies
Introduction
Taking the cultural dimension into account is nothing new in language teaching and learning. A widely defined notion of language is that people use language as a means of communication. English has already become firmly established as the international language of the present time, irrespective of the diverse range of situations and cultures throughout the world. For the last several decades we have been witnessing the fact that contemporary society is undergoing rapid and profound transformation on a wider scale. Economic globalization is a powerful factor underlying the changes taking place, and it is underpinned by the communications revolution. The past decades have seen a dramatic increase in travel, and more recently, new information technologies, notably the internet, have produced a degree of mobility, both true and virtual, that could hardly have been dreamt of half a century ago. As
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