Cultivation of Students39; Cultural Awareness in English Teaching in Senior School.doc

毕业论文(设计) Cultivation of Students Cultural Awareness in English Teaching in Senior School1. Introduction12. The necessity and significance of improving cultural awareness in senior English teaching32.1 The request of the development of Internationalization32.2 The imperative to the understanding of cultural background knowledge42.3 The relation between students basic skills and cultural knowledge42.3.1 Listening42.3.2 Speaking52.3.3 Reading62.3.4 Writing73. Contents of cultivating culture awareness83.1 Addresses83.2 Greetings93.3 Compliments and thanks103.4 .Privacy and taboos113.5 Color words124. Some methods of cultivating culture awareness144.1 Enhancing cultural background knowledge teaching144.2 Cultivating cultural awareness in classroom154.2.1 Objects and pictures154.2.2 Discussions and contrast164.2.3 Role-play174.2.4 Presentation184.2.5 English songs184.2.6 Audio-visual media194.3 Cultivating cultural awareness outside classroom204.3.1 Organizing English corner204.3.2 Using authentic materials214.3.3 Reading English works and writing diary in English214.4 Inspiring students cultural interest in learning225. Conclusion22References241. Introduction Language is just like a mirror that reflects its national culture. Professor Deng Yanchang once said, Learning a foreign Language well does not simply mean mastering its pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. In fact, the learning of a language is inseparable from the learning of its culture (1997). There is close relationship between language and culture. Language is the carrier of culture and culture is the content of language. There is no language without culture content (Zhang Tao, 2003). As a mirror of culture, language is strongly influenced and shaped by culture (Dai Weidong, 2002: 138). On one hand, culture will be unimaginable if it separates from language; on the other hand, language will lose its content and meaning if it separates from culture. Language is closely related to culture, they develop together in the matural effects and influences. Therefore, teaching English well means more than merely teaching students the vocabulary, structures, and grammars. It also means teaching them how to slip into the English culture. Learners should be informed of how native English speakers see the world and how the English language reflects the ideas, customs, and behavior of their society. As we look back to see the situation in Chinas schools, from the perspective of NEEC(National Entrance Examination for Colleges), English is considered to be important to all senior school students. However, for most students, the motivation of learning English is just a means to pass the exams and get high scores in English tests. And English teachers are just to help students reach this goal. Students spend most of the time on learning vocabulary, structures and grammar through lots of drills, practice and consolidation so as to memorize those knowledge, yet cultural knowledge is ignored. In this case, culture is often separated from its carrier-language. Both teachers and students cultural awareness are poor. As Chinese culture is not the same as that of English-speaking countries, the rules for using Chinese are, in some respects, different from those using English. The lack of culture knowledge leads to the failure in communication. Thus cultural education in senior English becomes absolutely necessary.2. The necessity and significance of improving cultural awareness in senior English teaching2.1 The request of the development of Internationalization China has now become a formal member of WTO, Beijing will host the Olympic Games in 2008. Whats more，our country has been taking effective measures to further the policy of reform and opening-up. Consequently, more and more cooperative and exchanging programs will be held between China and foreign countries. There should be more students with intercultural competence to meet this need. Its necessary to communicate with people from different cultural backgrounds. The modernization process accelerate the circulation of spiritual and material products, and bring all nationalities into a common global village, cross-cultural communication becomes an integral part of national life, yet cultural differences are the barriers of cross-cultural communication. If people do not understand the cultural convention in the USA or Britain, and use the way of China to treat foreigners, then it will create a lot of jokes, and even hurt each others feelings, self-esteem and cause misunderstanding. Thus, to overcome the cultural differences caused by communication barriers has become a common problem faced by the entire world. 2.2 The imperative to the understanding of cultural background knowledge Understanding cultural knowledge is the key to language learning. One can not really learn the language, and teach language well unless one knows the patterns and norms of culture and cultural background (Net. 1). Without a specific cultural background, language is non-existent. If students dont know the culture of target language, they would find it is difficult to understand the meaning of certain words. For example, Thanksgiving, Hotdog has been brought about in a specific social and historical circumstance, it is not enough merely to know the meaning of the surface of these words.2.3 The relation between students basic skills and cultural knowledge2.3.1 Listening Broadly speaking, listening is a process that listeners hear the voice and get the understanding of it. It needs to have not only the relative knowledge of words, tone, grammar, and so on, but also knowledge of the socio-cultural knowledge. Whether listeners have the knowledge is the key to achieve the listening comprehension. Such knowledge is common knowledge, beliefs and experiences of each communicator. If one neglects these existing cultural differences, he or she will have some obstacles to listen. For example, when students are doing listening exercises, they may hear some dialogues, which usually are easy. But if students do not know some cultural information about western countries, he may make some mistakes. For instance, the sentence I am not sure Id like to do that. is seemingly like considering a matter, but in fact, it is a polite expression of refusal. The purpose of listening is to understand the speakers real meaning in words and exchange information successfully. Sometimes the learner only catches the denotation of the words, but fail to consider the most important part, which is the contextual meaning of words and sentences.2.3.2 Speaking The ultimate goal of foreign language teaching is using language to communicate and exchange information, so when we communicate with the people from English-speaking countries, we must pay special attention to some interference factors in cultural exchanges. English speakers attach great importance to privacy when dealing with contact process, particularly between the less familiar people. It is necessary to avoid asking others affair, and sometimes even in the eyes of Chinese people for kindness, caring, but for the people from the English-speaking countries, maybe it is impolite, sometimes it will cause displeasure, embarrassment and dissatisfaction. Here are three questions: (1) Whats your name? (2) How old are you? (3) Are you married (Net. 2)? Any one who knows little English can ask these questions in English. But if a senior student asks a young lady from a western country the above questions, he has made a serious mistake. To avoid such silly mistakes, teachers should help students realize that it isnt polite to ask westerners questions concerning the age, income, marital status, and other private things, such as religious belief, political inclination, etc. Some of the daily English expressions are deliberately vague. For example, a person in the gathering may say, Id better be going now. Ive got a little headache. He might want to depart or not want to stay here any more. By this time, you would not have the habit of Chinese people to ask him how he feels. If he really feels uncomfortable he will say straightly.2.3.3 Reading English reading ability is a comprehensive ability. If one wants to read an article, find out the main idea, use the information provided by the articles for inference, judgment, reasoning, he or she must master not only English language knowledge, but also a certain degree of expertise or background knowledge. When students are reading an article, although they dont encounter a new word, have no grammatical obstacles and understand the literal meaning of each sentence, they cannot understand the overall effect of the article content and the main idea. Therefore, when we are training students reading abilities, we must base on training them to understand the whole passage or paragraph so that they can understand and become familiar with the material and cultural significance related to certain social background; understand the authors tone; be familiar with the article style and writing tendencies, correctly understand the true meaning of the text, and choose the correct answer (Wu Jun, 2003). The learners lack of cultural background knowledge often hinders their comprehension in reading. For example, we mean pornographic by the word huang in Chinese, but in English, blue is taken instead of yellow. If learners dont know, they will not understand what blue film or blue video tapes mean though the words are easy. This illustrates that words connotation is the result impacted by language. So more attention should be paid to cultural background in learning idioms and literary works, otherwise, we cannot understand the implication of words and passage correctly.2.3.4 Writing The differences between the Chinese and western modes of thinking play an important part in writing. Chinese are accustomed to thinking in a spiral way, while English and Americans in a linear way. This difference in thinking often leads to misunderstanding (Zhang Tao, 2003). Sometimes a learners composition is perfect in terms of grammar and logic, but when a foreigner reads it, he or she may misunderstand the original meaning of the sentences. Unless the students understand the cultural background, they cant finish their exercises accurately. Its evidently wrong to interpret things in foreign languages in the same way as in our mother tongue. To some extent, the achievement of English teaching goal relies on students cultural awareness. Therefore, it is of great importance to take for cultural background knowledge as one of the contents in the whole process of English teaching so as to help students to have a good command of necessary cultural knowledge.3. Contents of cultivating culture awareness Contents of intercultural awareness cultivation refer to all aspects of culture, but what should we teach in senior school? It is impossible for them to learn all the cultures of English-speaking countries because they dont have enough time. So, according to the New English Curriculum Standards for senior school and the analysis of the English textbooks, the contents of intercultural awareness cultivation should focus on the following aspects:3.1 Addresses The Chinese form of address by using of a persons title, office, or occupation, such as “黄局长，林经理，马校长”. But English native speakers seldom address others like this. The most frequently used titles are Mr. (for adult males), Mrs. (for married women), Miss (for unmarried women), Ms (for women whose marital status are unknown or is not indicated). There are some less frequently used titles such as president, prime minister, governor, mayor, doctor, judge, lawyer, and professor (Wang Zhenya, 1999: 139). So wed better say Good morning, Sir/Madam or Good morning, Mr. / Mrs. Wang. In China, we often address members of our family, relatives or close neighbors as “二哥、三姐、四婶、周大伯” which should not be carried over into English. In English, the name alone would be enough. It should be mentioned that in English Uncle and Auntie or something like that should be followed by a given name, not a family name, such as Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary. Therefore, Uncle Wang is a way of Chinese thinking style in English. In China, elderly people like to be called “老李”, “老王”, from which they feel they are much respected and therefore greatly satisfied. China is a country in which old people are respected. The older a person is, the more respected he is. Students are told to avoid such words as old and elderly when communicating with English native speakers. Chinese students may not quite know that Americans hate to be called the old. In America, they say senior citizen instead of old people.3.2 Greetings In everyday life, people always greet each other when they meet people coming from different cultural backgrounds. Proper greetings are sure to be a good beginning of a communication, and they can help us build up a good social relationship. It is essential for students to know how to greet to native speakers. They say Good morning! or Hello/Hi! when meeting in the morning, instead of Chinese saying: Have you had breakfast yet? For westerner the greeting might mean this: I havent either. Come on, lets go together and get something to eat. or it could indicate an invitation to a meal. When we Chinese meet for the first time, there is no special expression for the occasion. But as for most English-speaking people, when they meet for the first time, they often say something like How do you do? and Nice to meet you. And when they apart, they are expected to remark: Its nice meeting you. or Very nice talking with you. or something similar.3.3 Compliments and thanks It is quite common for people to exchange compliments in English speaking countries and in China. However, there are cultural differences between English and Chinese compliments and responses. It is noted that people from English-speaking countries tend to verbalize their gratitude and compliments more than Chinese speakers and they tend to accept thanks and compliments more than Chinese. When Chinese people hear compliments like You are so beautiful. or You speak excellent English. They may feel embarrassed and would say No, no to decline the expression of gratitude. However, a native English speaker will accept the complement by giving positive response like Thank you or Im glad to hear that. To them, accepting compliments is not an expression of pride or impoliteness; its almost dishonest to deny an expression of sentiment. Whats more, Thank you is used more widely in English-speaking countries than in China between members of the family, even for minor favors like borrowing a pencil, asking directions, passing an apple, etc. Lets look at this dialogue:Han Mei: Good evening, Lucy and Lily.Twins: Thanks for asking us.Han Mei: Would you like a moon-cake?Lucy: Yes, thank you.Han Mei: Would you like another one?Lucy: May I? Yes, Thanks.Han Mei: How about another one?Lucy: Oh no. Thank you. From the example above, we can know how often English-speaking people say thanks. On the contrary, in China, such polite expressions are often omitted, especially among close friends and family members. Many Chinese often regard the frequent use of thank you by English-speaking people unnecessary and even tiresome.3.4 .Privacy and taboos Some words or expressions are to be avoided because of the tradition or social custom. And the topics talked about must be carefully chosen to suit the speakers and the settings. This may not be easy to do even in ones mother tongue，and therefore in a foreign language it can be even more difficult. It is important to consider cultural factors in senior school English conversations. In students book, there is a dialogue between Meimei and Mrs. Green:Meimei: Hello! Whats your name?Mrs. Green: My name is Mrs. Green.Meimei: How old are you?Mrs. Green: Ah. Its a secret. English people place a high value on privacy. To most British and Americans, age is being considering one of the improper things to ask a stranger especially a lady. Besides age, ones income, marital status, political attitude and religion are also considered as privacies in English culture. So in senior school English teaching we should guide the students to avoid the following topics when talk with westerners: How old are you? How much do you earn? Are you married or single? What is your religion? How much did that dress cost you? How many children do you have?3.5 Color words Cultural differences are also evident in different implications associated with the same color. The color red in Chinese indicates happy events, joyous occasions and delightful things. In China, red always indicates some satisfied things or events, especially in the wedding. However, in western countries, people always avoid wearing red clothes when they take part in a wedding. As red in English-speaking countries has the connotation of devil, it is not a suitable color for a wedding, which is completely different from that in China. So it is more suitable and sensible not to dress in red when attending a wedding party in western countries (Yang Hongyan, 2005). In the concept of English nations, red has a closed relationship with blood, terror, fight and is frequently connected with anger and crimes. And the word red will remind them of something terrible. Such as red hands, red battle, which can not be literately interpreted as “红手”(hongshou) and “红色战争”(hongsezhanzheng) in China, but they mean hands that are full of blood