A Brief Study of Teaching Culture in Middle School English Class.doc

中学英语文化教学浅析a brief study of teaching culture in middle school english classcontentsabstract.1key words.1i. introduction.2ii. research background.21. research situations in foreign countries22. research situation in china3iii. the relationship between language and culture.41. the definitions of culture and language.42. the relationship between culture and language.43. the relationship between culture and english teaching.4iv. problems of this research.51. misunderstanding in cross-cultural communication.52. mistakes in intercultural translation.5v. teaching culture.61. the contents of cross-cultural communication. .62. the objectives of teaching culture.73. the principles of teaching culture.74. methods of teaching culture.9vi. conclusion.12references.13第 13 页 共 13 页abstract: “culture consists of all the shared products of human society” (robertson:1981). this means not only such material things as cities, organizations and schools, but also non-material things such as ideas, customs, family patterns and language. language is a part of culture and plays a very important role in it. without language, they maintain, culture would not be possible. on the other hand, language is influenced and shaped by culture; it reflects culture. in the broad sense, language is the symbolic representation of a people, and it comprises their historical and cultural backgrounds as well as their approach to life and their ways of living and thinking. learning and teaching a foreign language well means more than merely mastering the pronunciation, grammar, words and idioms. it means learning also to see the world as native speaker of that language see it. learning a language, in fact, is inseparable from learning its culture. therefore, we should pay more attention to the culture introduction during the learning of english. especially, in our middle school english class, we should teach the students more culture of english-speaking countries.key words: english culture; teaching; middle school 摘要：罗伯逊曾在1981年提出，文化包含了人类所有的财富。这就意味着它不仅包含诸如城市、机构、学校等物质上的东西，还有例如观点、风俗、家庭组成模式、语言等意识领域的事物。语言是文化的一个重要组成部分，并且在文化中扮演十分重要的角色。如果没有语言，文化也是不可能存在下去的。另一方面，语言受文化的影响，它是文化的一个侧面反映。从广义上来讲，语言只是一个民族象征性的代表，组成了他们的文化和历史背景以及人们的生活方式和思维方式。因此，学好一门外语不仅仅是掌握它的语音、语法、词汇和习语，同时还要学会以讲该母语的人一样看世界。学习语言和学习文化是密不可分的。因此，我们提倡在我们学习英语时要注意文化的导入，尤其在我们中学英语课堂上，我们应该尝试教授学生更多的英美文化。关键词：英语文化; 教学; 中学 i. introductionnowadays, more and more people in china learn english. however, misunderstanding and wrongly usage is ubiquitous. no matter what angle we should think about, nobody wants to make mistakes when they make a speech or write an essay. even though there are many causes in it, in my opinion, the biggest problem is culture. culture gaps between the source language and the target language have always turned out to be a hard obstacle for english learner. the teaching of culture is a important part of foreign language teaching. this makes it necessary to explore the teaching of culture in the middle school english classroom. it will be demonstrated that teaching a foreign language in middle school is not just to give a homily on syntactic structures or learning new vocabulary and expressions, but mainly incorporates, or should incorporate some cultural elements, which are relative with language itself. specifically, some consideration will be given to the relationship between culture and middle school foreign language teaching and principles of teaching culture. furthermore, an attempt will be made to incorporate culture into the classroom by means of considering some techniques and methods currently used. the main idea of the paper is that effective communication is more than a matter of language proficiency. and apart from enhancing and enriching communicative competence, cultural competence can also lead to students understanding and respect toward different culture.no linguistics text can exist out of a certain cultural context, here defined as the way a text is related to cultural elements in the source culture. even when all linguistic symbols can be semantically referred to a system of different linguistic symbols, the relationships of the text to the source culture can never be reproduced by the relations between the target text and the target culture. in a sense, cultural clashes are inevitable. cultural divergence will often challenge the english learners, especially the students of middle school. in order to make them excellent foreign language learners, we should make them do well in the cross-cultural communication.ii. research background1. research situations in foreign countriesculture in language learning is the fifth skill, tacked on, so to speak, to the teaching of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. it is always in the background , ready to unsettle the good language learners 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. (neubert: 1)in foreign language education, the importance of teaching foreign culture has been widely recognized. however, there are diverse proposition and arguments about the pedagogical treatment of culture. how to teach culture in foreign language education is a problem faced by language educators all over the world. the problem is not a simple pedagogical one. it is very complicated since the answer relies on our understanding of the relations between home culture and foreign culture, the relations between language and culture, and the role of foreign language education in a given cultural and political context. the teaching of culture is not akin to the transmission of information regarding the people of the target community or countryeven though knowledge about (let alone experience of) the “target group” is an important ingredient (robertson:118). it would be nothing short of ludicrous to assert that culture is merely a repository of facts and experiences to which one can have recourse, if need be. furthermore, what kramsch seems to state is that to learn a foreign language is not merely to learn how to communicate but also to discover how much the target language allows learners to manipulate grammatical forms, sounds, meanings and culture.2. research situation in china in early 1980s, mr. xu guozhang gave a speech titled the cultural connotation of words and english teaching. it indicats that the foreign language teaching field starts to show its attention on the relationships between culture and foreign language. after that, some articles on culture and foreign language teaching are published. in 1988, mr. hu wenzhong published his essay collections cross- cultural communication and english study. it collected some essays on the comparison study on english and chinese culture. in 1989, deng yanchang and liu runqing edited language and culture-the comparison between english and chinese culture. the work made a comparison between the different vocabulary, idioms, culture and body languages of the two languages. the common ground of the research work is that foreign language teaching should foster the students abilities of cross-cultural communication. culture is an indispensable part of foreign language teaching. in 2001, for the first time in history, the fostering of students awareness of culture was listed as one of the goals in the english teaching curriculum standards. iii. the relationship between language and culture1. the definitions of culture and language1) there are more than 250 definitions concerning culture. there are various ways of its classification. the first important anthropological definition of culture is presented by sir edward tylor. he defines culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, customs and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (edward tylor: 1871). tylors definition has continually been the basis of most modern anthropological conceptions of culture.2) it has always been difficult for linguists and philologists to give a concise definition of language. although there has been an enormous amount of research in language in the past, no authoritative answer has been given to “what is language?” here is a sample definition of “language” proposed by de saussure(1916). he said, language is a system whose parts can and must be considered in their synchronic solidarity.2. the relationship between culture and languagealmost all cultures seem to have certain notion or things. language mirrors culture. culture can be described as a blueprint that guides the behavior of people in a community. language and culture are not separable. language is a part of culture and it is influenced and shaped by culture. just as sapir said, language is a guide to a social reality.foreign language learning in some respects involves learning a foreign culture. it is readily understood and admitted that one can not learn a foreign language well unless one knows something of the country where the language is used and the people who speak it. it also has been acknowledged since the middle 1960s that in addition to linguistic competence, some other issues concerned with the communicative competence. among these issues are cultural concerns, such as the awareness of cultural difference between the people of the target language and the learner group, cross-cultural understanding or feeling comfortable with another person” (robertson 1985: 289) 3. the relationship between culture and english teachinglanguage is part of culture. the chinese language is part of the chinese culture and english is part of the english culture. there is no culture that has no language as its part. language and culture are not separable. human knowledge and experience are described and stored in language. customs, habits and behavioral patterns can be described and analyzed in language. social institutions, value systems, beliefs, world views can be described, analyzed and evaluated in language. in short, language can represent every aspect of culture. language is the mirror of culture. the close relationship between language and culture has been shown by the fact that culture is transmitted from one generation to the next through language for the coming generation to learn. while children learn their native language, they also learn their native culture and are eventually accepted as members of their culture. language learning and culture learning are not separable (wang zhenya:21).in short, language and culture are closely related, each influencing and shaping the other. to teach a foreign language implies to teach the culture in which it is spoken. a language can never be taught in a cultural vacuum. based on the research achievements home and abroad, people came to a common ground that foreign language teaching should focus on cultivating the students abilities of cross-cultural communication and their awareness of culture. in cross-cultural communication, people are required with not only the knowledge of phonetics, grammar, vocabulary, language function, but also the understanding of the culture carried in target language. if not, misunderstanding caused by cultural barriers may occur. so its important to cultivate the students sensitivity over the target language in middle school english classroom. iv. problems of this research1. misunderstanding in cross-cultural communicationin cross-cultural communication, language learners always make mistakes, not only in grammar, pronunciation, words and expressions but also in culture. and culture factors always are the main reason in cross-cultural communication. and it can be divided into four forms: 1) social language is unbefitting2) culture pattern is unacceptable3) different attitudes conflict with each other4) different expressions make them incomprehensibility2. mistakes in intercultural translation the western linguist, saussure made contribution to this theory. he put forward that linguistics had diachronic and synchronic. also, intercultural translation has diachronic and synchronic. it has huge cultural gaps between east and west. they have their own words and expressions to describe their ideas. of course, there must be mistakes in communication besides translators in translation. here, there are two obvious mistakes:1) cultural dispositionhawkes, a professor in cambridge, translated “amitabba (a mi tuo fo)” into god bless my son when he translated dream of the red chamber. the result will lead to culture in confusion.2) cultural default cultural default is defined as absence of relevant cultural background knowledge shared by the translators themselves and their intended readers. v. teaching culturein the past decade or so, developments in this academic area have been extremely rapid, especially from the chinese point of view. it is encouraging to observe that what this thesis first proposed in the early 1990s has now become a widely discussed and well published topic and enjoys such excellent company-hu wenzhong, deng yanchang, jose lambert, wolfram wilss, itamar eeven-zohar, gideon toury, hans vermeer ,chirstiance nord and many more.1. the contents of cross-cultural communicationteaching culture is consisted of culture knowledge and rules of communication. culture knowledge includes politics, economics, literature, art, history, geography, philosophy and some idioms, proverbs, which can show the culture elements of english speaking countries. whereas the rules of communication includes introduction, greeting, invitation making apologies ,making thanks, callings, shopping, dating, seeing doctors, making suggestions etc. besides what are mentioned, we should learn other forms of english cultural backgrounds, including body language, closing, making a speech, sense of cherishing time etc. some linguists prefer that during the direct communication of people, 30% information is transmitted by language meanwhile 70% of it is conveyed buy non language methods. (wang zhenya:25). culture teaching studies in china do not have a long history, but since china has been an open country to the outside world, more and more english teacher and learners are on the way of seeking the methods of mastering the culture of west. nowadays, different life styles form different cultures all over the world. if we want to master a second language, it is not only a linguistic activity, but a cultural communication in substance. and we pay attention to culture more than others.2. the objectives of teaching culturegenerally, foreign language teaching should foster the students awareness of culture and their ability of cross-cultural communication. from the foreign language teachers point of view, tomalin and stempleski illustrated as follows,1) to help students to develop an understanding of the fact that all people exhibit culturally-conditioned behaviors.2) to help students to develop an understanding that social variables such as age, sex, social classes, and place of residence influence the ways in which people speak and behave.3) to help students to become awareness of conventional behaviors in common situations in the target culture.4) to help students to increase their awareness of the cultural connotations of words and phrases in the target language.5) to help students to develop the abilities to evaluate and refine generalizations about the target culture, in terms of supporting evidence.6) to help students to develop the necessary skills to locate and organize information about the target culture.7) to stimulate students intellectual curiosity about the target culture, and to encourage empathy towards its people (lv lianghuan:188). the new english curriculum standards describes the development of culture consciousness in eight levels. it can be generally concluded as two parts, the first is to master the knowledge of the target language culture and foster the students abilities of using the cultural knowledge of the target language in real communication situation. whats more, the teaching of foreign culture should also focus on students cultural creativity. creativity is a power to create new things. its a human capacity developed by learning( chen shen:230). chinese students should learn how to solve chinese problems in learning from foreign culture and we should encourage them to learn from the interaction between home culture and foreign culture. 3. the principles of teaching culture classroom teaching is the main approach for the students to learn the english culture, so it is important to incorporate culture into the english classroom. then what principles should be followed while incorporating culture? based on the middle school students real situation and the characteristics of english culture, the following principles should be followed. 1) teaching culture systematically the students culture knowledge structure is limited if the teacher just incorporate culture knowledge according to the need of teaching content. when the teachers make a one-term or one-year teaching plan for english language knowledge teaching, they should also make a general plan for english culture teaching. the teachers are required to teach culture in the whole teaching process. special introduction to some topics can be made, such as “body languages in english communication” and “different meanings of term