Culture applied into the English language teaching.doc

. introductionit exists a common phenomenon in our english learners, that is, although many students have acquired four skills-listening, speaking, reading and writing according to the demand of our traditional syllabus, they often make mistakes in application of language to real life, even they can make up grammatically and semantically correct sentences, some of them are not appropriate or feasible in the current situations; whats worse, sometimes it will violate cultural principle in the target language community, thus communicative failure occurs at times. the reason is we all ignore cultural teaching, applied into the english language teaching.since 1980s, the research of relation between language and culture has gained more and more attention. the book culture and communication (胡文仲,1994) gives us a systematic introduction of new outcomes about relation between culture and language, the content and method of cultural teaching, etc. in fact, cultures differ from one another. each culture is unique. “learning a foreign language well means more than merely mastering the pronunciation, grammar, words and idioms. it means learning to see the world as native speakers of that language see it, learning the ways in which their language reflects the ideas, customs and behavior of their society, learning to understand theirlanguage of mind. learning a language, is inseperatable from learning its culture.” (耿延宏, 2000)this paper mainly applies different culture into three stages of english language teaching systematically._its said that there are more than 200 kinds of definitions of culture (孙军, 2000). its difficult to define because it is a large concept. however, as one that focuses on what cultures characteristics are. culture involves learned and shared behaviors, norms, values and material objects. it also contains what human creat to express values, attitudes, and norms (linda beamer and iris varner, 2003). in a word, “culture refers to the total way of life of particular groups of people. it includes everything that a group of people thinks. the culture of every society is unique, containing combination of norms and values that are found nowhere else,” which is also the mostly widely used and the simplest one. (robertson, 1981) culture can be divided into different dimensions according to different standards, among which two types of divisions are the most popular. first, “culture” versus “culture”. big culture indicating culture in the socio-historical sense defined as the products and contributions of a society, which includes both material products and spiritual products of a society. small culture refers to culture in an anthropological sense, i.e. the total way of life of a people, such as their language, customs, habits, political system, etc. it is the small sense of culture that we pay special attention to in our language teaching. second, culture is divided into surface-level culture, intermediate-level culture, and deep-level culture. surface-level mainly refers to those tangible things or material products, e.g. clothes, music, buildings, etc. intermediate-level culture is principle culture, which contains customs and habits, way of behavior, etc. deep-level culture is ideology culture, which consists of way of thinking, sense of value, etc.those three levels of culture correlate closely: surface-level culture and intermediate-level culture find roots in deep-level culture, one concept of deep-level culture is reflected in aesthetic forms or real objects in surface-level culture, or in customs or habits in intermediate-level culture. of course, they are not necessarily in one-to-one relationship. for example, the typical characteristic of western culture is the worship of “individualism”, such real life, they pursue unique style, special clothes and hairstyles, self-confidence, freedom to say what they think in public, etc. in contrast, chinese people are taught to be “collective” from childhood, which requires them to consider the benefits of their country and group first. roughly speaking, as second language learners, their ways of thinking and behaving are easily influenced by the deep-level culture of the target language community._*_. the necessity of teaching culturea. relation between language and culturelanguage and culture are not two independent items; on the contrary, they are closely related with each other. culture and language are inseparatable. on the one hand, every language is part of culture. culture consists of customs, habits, way of behavior, sense of value, sense of beauty, and the most important, the language. on the other hand, language is the carrier of culture, i.e. language is the primary means by which culture transmits its beliefs, values and norms. as such, it cant but serve and reflect cultural needs. therefore, whorf in the paper foreign language teaching and research (邓炎昌, 1989) believes: “different cultures features-the environmental material, or social-produce different linguistic features.” if however, language is seen as social practice, culture becomes the very core of language teaching. b. culture versus language teachingsince culture has such a close relation with language, it is necessary to teach culture in language teaching process. we should not only pass on knowledge of language and train learners competence of utilizing language, but also enhance teaching of relative cultural background knowledge. in teaching of aural comprehension, we find many students complain that much time has been used in listening, but little achievement has been acquired. in order to improve competence of listening comprehension, some students specially buy tape records for listening and spend quite a few hours every day on it, but once they meet new materials, still, they fail to understand. what is the reason? on the one hand, maybe some students english is very poor and they havent grasped enough vocabularies, clear grammar or correct pronunciation, or maybe the material is rather difficult, etc. on the other hand, an important reason is that they are unfamiliar with cultural background of the usa and england. aural comprehension, which is closely related to the knowledge of american and british culture, politics and economy, in fact, is an examination of ones comprehensive competence which includes ones english level, range of knowledge, competence of analysis and imaginative power.maybe we have this experience: when we are listening to something familiar to us, no matter what is concerned, usually we are easy to understand. even if there are some new words in the material, we are able to guess their meanings according to its context. however, when we encounter some unfamiliar material or something closely related to cultural background, we may feel rather difficult. even if the material is easy, we only know the literal meaning, but cant understand the connotation, because we lack knowledge of cultural background.here is a sentence from a report: “the path to november is uphill all the way.” “november” literally means “the eleventh month of year.” but here refers to “the presidential election to be held in november.” an other example is “red-letter days”which is a simple phrase and is easy to hear, meaning holidays such as christmas and other special days. but students are often unable to understand them without teachers explanation.below are two jokes often talked about by americans:1. a: where are you from?b: ill ask her. (alaska)a: why do you ask her?2. a: where are you from?b: how are you. (hawaii)a may think b has given an irrelevant answer. but if a knew something about geographical knowledge of the usa, and the names of two states of the usaalaska and hawaii, he would not regard “alaska” as “ill ask her”, or “hawaii” as “how are you”.in view of this, the introduction of cultural background is necessary in the teaching of english listening. likewise, speaking is not merely concerned with pronunciation and intonation. students can only improve their oral english and reach the aim of communication by means of enormous reading, mastering rich language material and acquaintance of western culture. therefore, in-oral training, teachers should lay stress on factuality of language and adopt some material approving to daily life, such as daily dialogues with tape, magazines, newspapers and report etc., because the material is from real life, and it helps students to be well acquainted with standard pronunciation and intonation, to speak english appropriate to the occasion, to understand western way of life and customs etc. otherwise, misunderstanding and displeasure are inevitably aroused.so culture awareness and learning of a second culture can only aid the attaining of second language proficiency. teaching of culture implicitly or explicitly permeates the teaching of social interaction, the spoken and written language. for a long time in language teaching history, foreign language teaching is predicted on the conviction that since we are all human beings, we share the same code of language; therefore, all that language, teachers have to do is to help students to understand that code. (this conviction leads to the emergence of functional and pragmatic approach of language teaching). however, when it comes to the teaching of culture, it encounters difficulties, as culture is different from one country (areas) to another. german linguist claire kramsch (1993) believes: “culture is not an independent aspect of language learning or teaching, it is a feature of language, it is always in the background, right from day, ready to unsettle the good language learners proficiency when they expect it least making evident the limitations of their hard-won communicative competence, challenging, their ability to make sense of the world around them (context and culture in language teaching).” however, as we know, culture covers so many aspects that it is impossible to teach everything in limited classroom. teachers should make a proper teaching plan and teach different kinds of culture step by step according to the students current level and curriculum.*_(. integrating culture at three stagesas professor 胡文仲 (1994) has pointed out: “both culture teaching and culture research have stages. culture and language depend on each other, and culture exists everywhere. therefore, we should not teach culture just to high-level students. students should have access to culture as soon as they come into contact with that language.” generally speaking, culture becomes more and more important as students language proficiency develops. so the writer thinks cultural teaching should be divided into three stages. a. the first stageat the primary stage of language teaching and learning, students are quite interested in the difference between target culture and their native culture, language teachers should take advantage of this curiosity to introduce surface-level culture contained in certain vocabulary.vocabulary is the basic unit of language. it is vocabulary that can directly reflect the culture of a language community. the most typical example is the introduction of loanwords. for example, “道”, “功夫” in chinese, “baby boom”, “hippies” in american english, “champagne” in french, etc. “道”, founded by 老子 and 庄子, is one of the two most influenced religions in chinese history, people who believe in dao have their particular way of dealing with problems in social life, “baby boom” refers to a special phenomenon in the usa after the vietnam war when many couples gave birth to children “champagne” is a place in france famous for wine, and now it is the brand of a wine. all these words are unique to ones nation and reflect their particular historical culture. moreover, even we can find out equal referents for certain words, their connotative meanings may be different: “in china, dogs are kept to watch the house, whenever they see a stranger, it barks. so dogs represent a ferocious and tedious image. when the worddog appears in sentences or utterances, it often has derogative meanings, chinese idioms have seen many cases: e.g. 狗仗人势狗头军师狗胆包天, etc.” (王涛, 2006) however, in english speaking countries, dogs in most cases are considered faithful friends of human beings, thus the word “dog” in most cases has positive meaning, as in the following phrases and sentences: “a lucky dog”, “as faithful as a dog”, “love me, love my dog”. one more example: in china, students describe the athelets “生龙活虎” at sports meeting. the athelets on the playground are all as lively as dragons and tigers. in english, the association that dragon causes is completely different from association that “dragon” causes in chinese. it refers to devil and makes people feel terror. from these examples, we can find connotative meaning is a subjective element, which refrains peoples way of behavior in a certain sense, and it is a sensitive area in inter-cultural communication, therefore, it cannot be neglected.“comparative study” (李庭芗, 2004) of words at this stage is very important. through comparison, we can not only know the original meaning of words, but also the different connotative meanings of the same words in different culture, which greatly reduces the possibility of misusing them when entering another culture. teachers can compare words by means of listing them in diagrams, which have several columns: following a functional approach, leech (1981, categorizes 7 kinds of meaning: conceptual meaning, connotative meaning, social meaning, affective meaning, reflected meaning, collocation meaning and thematic meaning in linguistics: a course book (胡壮麟, 2001). after each class, teachers pick out the important words and ask students to collect materials and find out the different meanings and examples from books, journals, internet, etc. and in the next class, the teacher ask the students to write all the answers on the blackboard or a piece of paper for them to remember. b. the second stageat the intermediate level stage of language teaching, emphasis should be put on linguistic phenomena, customs, peoples way of behavior, etc. which are related to medium-level culture.constrained by living periods, places, and different nationalities, most linguistic phenomena can reflect different customs, living habits and way of behavior. language is the product of or outcome of culture as well as the medium of communication among different cultures. language, though with similar content, perform different functions, or the other way around, the same function can be performed by different language forms. in china, when people meet an acquaintance, they usually ask: “have you eaten?” (around dinnertime) “where are you going?” when they talk with a stranger, they usually start with: “how old are you? what do you do?” “ how much do you earn per month ?” in all these cases, english people would just say “hello” or “hi”. in fact, it is absolutely not the case that chinese people like to interfere with others privacy; it is just their special way of greeting, linguistic phenomena like congratulating, thanking, compliments, taboo, etc. should be paid special attention to at this stage, because feasible use of language can strengthen friendship and remove cultural barriers while inappropriate use of words, although native pronunciation and correct grammatical structure, would destroy the communication atmosphere, even lead to the end of the talk.at this stage, teachers should familiarize students with special customs in the target language community and tell them how it differs from their native culture. for example, what should a guest do when being invited to dinner in a western family (when to arrive, what to bring, how to behave correctly in and after dinner), what people do on special days (e.g. on christmas, easter day, national day). students can easily find this kind of information in reading materials like books, journals, or internet either in english or chinese. as it is said: “ the best way to learn something is being part of it.” so the best way to learn a language is living in their community. however, few people would have this opportunity due to different reasons. teachers can try to create such an atmosphere, e.g. at the beginning of each class, students are asked to put on a small play using what they have learned in the last class (lasting 3-5 minutes), each playing a certain role, students must be very interested in playing an actor (actress) and make good preparations. during the presentation, both the actors and the audience (i.e. other students) can learn more than from just the books. c. the third stageat the upper-level stage, besides comparative study of language and culture related to medium-level culture, teacher should put more emphasis on the understanding, analysis and comparison of linguistic phenomenon related to deep-level culture.because of different nations, economic foundations, historical periods, political systems and so on, people have different ways of thinking, sense of values and sense of beauty. comparison of deep culture can help find the reason of cultural mistakes as well as predict what kind of mistakes students are prone to make, which together make it easy for teachers to perform culture teaching systematically. moreover, comparison of deep culture can offer explanations for “puzzling” linguistic phenomena and serve as behavioral guidance for intercultural communication. social-anthropologists have already draw out the overall deep structures of cultures in different countries from huge amount of living habits, biology, laws and communication principles. we need compare th