On the application of native cultural resources in English education of universities in ethnic minority areas——Taking Enshi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture as an example

Abstract

Chinese universities have long given priority to the input of Western culture in English education while the native culture, namely the Chinese culture, has been seriously ignored. As a matter of fact, the model of English education based on the target culture can hardly meet the needs of the current situation of using English. As an international language communication tool, English should be fully integrated with the local pragmatic environment and used to serve the local economy. The acquisition of native culture can not only reduce learners’ anxiety and improve their learning efficiency, but also facilitate learners’ better understanding of Chinese and western cultures and improve their intercultural communicative competence as well. The following strategies can be adopted to apply the local cultural resources of Enshi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture to English education in its ethnic colleges and universities: 1) to foster the educational concept of attaching equal importance to Western culture and native culture; 2) To take local culture education an important part of college English curriculum and instructional design; 3) to build a Chinese-English parallel Corpus of local culture resources of Enshi; 4) to establish a practice base of local culture education