Introducing Chinese-English Cultural Contrasts into College English Teaching: A Empirical Study and the Implications

According to the teaching objectives and nature of the course described in The Teaching Requirements of CE Course by the Ministry of Education, the authors attempt to introduce the Chinese-English cultural contrasts into English language teaching and make an empirical study on the basis of current theoretical studies about the relationship between culture and language skills. The statistics show that the introduction to the contrasts as a learning task agrees with learners- needs and can significantly foster their language skills (reading and writing), self-evaluation about language skills, autonomy, sense of cultural differences and interest in learning. Moreover, the authors make a discussion about the mistakes in understanding cultural introduction into CE teaching and in language acquisition environment, the probability of mutual promotion between input and output, and negative transfers of factors from the two cultures in communication.