Cultural Self-consciousness and Its Realization

Abstract

Today’s globalization and multicultural environment have aroused people’s cultural selfconsciousness, which enables students to recognize the similarities and differences between the native culture and other cultures and view their native culture from a different frame of reference. At the same time,they could also take a more detached stance toward different cultures rather than blindly exclude or assimilate. College English textbooks are the carriers that enable students to contact with the target culture. Based on the analysis of the data collected from the college English text books, this paper takes the intercultural perspective to study the cultural self-consciousness and its realization, which would help the students raise awareness of the importance of cultural self-consciousness and provide advice to the future authors of college English textbooks. 1. Connotation and Significance of Cultural Consciousness Cultural consciousness refers to people living in a certain culture who have "self-knowledge" of their culture, understand its origin, formation process, characteristics and development trend. It doesn’t mean "cultural return", or to "revive the old", but also do not advocate "wholly westernized" or "wholly other". The aim of self-knowledge is to strengthen the ability of self-determination in cultural transformation and to acquire the autonomous position in deciding to adapt to the new environment and cultural choices in the new era. Cultural consciousness enables people to understand the similarities and differences between native culture and other cultures, to reflect on their own native culture from another different reference frame, and to take a more detached stand against different cultures, rather than blindly excluding or assimilating them. To cultivate this cultural consciousness, we need to understand the deep connotation of different cultures in the process of contacting with different cultures, understand the "other" on the basis of clarifying self-cultural identity, and realize the reconstruction of cultural identity. With the introduction of Xi Jinping's "one belt and one way" strategic initiative, the importance of "cultural consciousness" in foreign language education is becoming more and more important. This is not only the need for China to carry out economic and cultural cooperation and exchanges with the countries along the belt and road, but also to enhance the national image of our country. Chinese foreign language education should open up the concept of cultural self-consciousness, take human self-consciousness as its foundation, take the evolution of Chinese culture as its essential process and take the self-education of the Chinese nation as its orientation, so as to highlight the cultural function of foreign language education and open up a new direction for the development of foreign language education. 2. the Current Situation of Cultivating Cultural Consciousness of Non-English Majors in Colleges and Universities In view of the importance of developing "cultural consciousness" in Colleges and Universities under the background of "one belt and one road" strategy, this study conducted a preliminary survey on the cultivation of "cultural consciousness" of nonEnglish Majors in Colleges and universities, and designed questionnaires for teachers. The results of the data analysis show that students generally have a good grasp of the basic knowledge of Chinese and Western culture and intercultural 4th International Conference on Humanities Science and Society Development (ICHSSD 2019) Copyright © 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 328