英语教学论文.doc

A Brief Talk on Culture Teaching in English Education论英语教学中的文化教学潢溪中心小学 童真【内容摘要】在外语教学中文化教学已被认为是一个非常重要的因素。而且英语已经成为一种国际语言，与外国人的语言交流其实是一种文化交流，所以本论文主要谈论文化和英语教学的关系。本文主要分三个部分： 首先，文化教学对英语语言教学的作用。其次，导入文化的有效方法。最后，对英语教师在进行课堂文化教学时的一个提醒。【关键词】文化；文化教学；英语教学；作用；有效方法【Abstract】 Culture teaching has been considered to be a very important element in foreign language teaching, and English has become an international language, the communication in language with foreigners is in fact a kind of culture communicating. So this paper mainly talks about the relationship between culture and English teaching. There are three parts in this paper. Firstly, I would like to talk about the influences of culture teaching on English language. Secondly, I will talk about the effective ways to introduce culture. Finally, I will give a suggestion in Teaching Cultures in English class.【Key words】culture; culture teaching; English teaching; influences; effective ways1. Introduction In China traditional ways to teach English tend to focus on language itself but ignore culture. For example, English education in China has been using the traditional voice, grammar, vocabulary teaching model for many years. Especially under the pressure of college entrance exam, CET-4 and CET-6, exam-oriented teaching is dominant and culture teaching is excluded. As a result, it has been observed that many learners who learn English as a foreign language are severely deficient in cultural knowledge, although they got high scores in exams. In fact, culture teaching is the most basic purpose and requirement in English teaching. It is not only a simple language teaching, for language is an integral part of a socio-cultural structure. Although it is an important dynamic factor in this structure, it is impacted by other components, such as, voice, grammar and vocabulary. There is a far-reaching and unbreakable relationship among them. Any nations survival and development are inseparable from the nations culture. If we want to have a complete control of a language but departing from the nations culture, it is simply impossible, because any language is placed in a specific socio-cultural environment. In recent years, foreign language teaching has got more attention than ever before. More and more foreign language teachers are aware of that second language learning is often second culture learning and cultural competence. So it is of great importance to give students culture teaching in ELT (English Language Teaching). And since English has become an international language and now is most widely used in the world. So in this paper, I will mainly discuss the influences of culture teaching on English language and how culture teaching can be conducted in English classroom to help Chinese students learn English more effectively. Finally, I must suggest that the English teachers should teach with care.2. Influences of Culture Teaching on English Language2.1 The Purpose of Foreign Language Teaching The purpose of foreign language teaching should be to eventually cultivate the language application ability, interpersonal skills. People can not learn a foreign language well without knowing the culture. The teaching method which only emphasizes the language form and the internal structure of language cuts the relationship among language, meaning and function. Using this method to teach student will make them do the tests which are specifically for practicing grammar and form well. But it is inevitable that they will lack the ability (including reading and writing ability) and even make errors, then ultimately they will fail to reach the real purpose of learning a foreign language. 2.2 Relationship between Culture and Language What is culture? Claire Kramsch (1955:84), an expert at language teaching and learning in the context of culture, defines culture in two ways that one is from the angle of humanities, spotlighting the way members of the same group in society, representing themselves through the material heritage, reproducing mechanisms and historical preservation. The other, from the perspective of the social sciences, is related to the share of ways of thinking, behaving and remembering, to which members of that social group contribute. Material heritage, in other words, refers to artifacts which are considered as the fundamental constituents of culture (Cole, 1996:144). Differing from these persons abstract conceptions, Nieto itemized culture in seven attributes in light of the inevitability of peoples daily lives being influenced historically; economically and politically. One of them worth being specified is the nature of being learned. This implies human beings are not born with culture identity, but in line with Kramsch people grow a cultural consciousness through learning in a cultural environment rather than in classrooms. According to Kramsch, literature as a part of culture, the record of the past, the narrative of the present as well as the imagination of the future, is actually accomplished through language. Thus literature in itself is the best illustration of the impossibility of language teaching and learning in isolation from culture. In the word of Kramsch, this idea is named as teaching and learning language as culture. When someone is carrying out intercultural communication people, it is necessary to pay attention to using some cultural patterns of English language. Such as, terminologies of titles, greetings, introduction, gifts, visit, thanks, and apologies, etc. Every nation has its own unique cultural traditions, also have their own unique cultural patterns, and language is the carrier of culture and the main manifestation of culture. The way it uses embodies the nations cultural identity. Chinese language culture attaches importance to peoples sociality. The everyday language reflects the characteristics of mutual love, mutual interest and mutual understanding among people, etc. While English language culture embodies the self-centered characteristic. For example, when acquaintances are greeting, Chinese people like to ask “Have you had your dinner?” “Where are you going?”; but people from English-speaking countries tend to say “Hello”. They cant understand why Chinese people greet by personal privacy questions and they even feel surprised. Another example, there are two Chinese persons who were good friends but havent seen each other for many years. Today they met each other. Look at the dialogue as follows: A: Anna, long time no see. You are still so pretty!B: No, I am getting older, I am not prettier than you. While in English-speaking countries, praising is very common used in communication. The most common answer is, “Thank you”. Such as, A: You skirt looks nice.B: Thank you.Only when people know such cultural identity well then they can really learn English well and carry out communication in English appropriately. Language is a reflection of culture. It has a profound cultural connotation, and culture is a complex social phenomenon which pervades every aspect of social life. There is someone who puts the image of language as a tree, culture as a forest. It is a very apt analogy. If people only embody the language but neglect the culture which language relied on to exist. It means seeing trees not woods, so it is difficult to completely understand and properly use the language we have learnt. When a well-known scholar in the United States talked about intercultural communication, he said, “Once only mastering a language does not mean he can fully use the language to engage in normal communication.” Even sometimes he not only fails to communicate, but also may have dramatically opposite results. Language is inseparable from culture, and culture relies on language. English education is a kind of language education, so of course, it cant be inseparable from the culture teaching.2.3 Culture and Students Interests in English Learning In teaching process, cultural education can guide students to enter the temple of Western culture which is magnificent like that of Chinese culture in order to understand the ideas of Western culture, taste the exotic styles and different emotions and customs of western society. For example, in the process of teaching “Abrham Linoln”, teachers can introduce Lincolns struggle to be the president of the United States from an common citizen, so that students can have a feeling of a great personality of timeless charming; in the process of teaching “Martin Luther King JR”, teachers can allow students to peep at the true history of American racial status and the quo the fact, so that students can know Americas arbitrariness and ridiculousness of condemning on the human right of other countries; In the process of teaching“ The Necklace”, students can know the vanity and hypocrisy of the west upper society; in the process of teaching “ Computers”, teachers can introduce the computer technology and the modern communication technology which bring our society with the earth-shaking changes, as well as the myth of the rapid development of the new economy which created by the United States at its foundation. In the new teaching materials, there is a text of “Olympic Games”, teachers can make students have a better understanding of the history and the development of the Olympic games and sports competition. There is an old saying like that, interest is the best teacher. Teaching students English should first develop students interests in learning English. 2.4 Culture and Reading Comprehension “Reading Comprehension” means extracting the required information from the text as effectively as possible. There are two broad levels in reading:1) visual signals from the eyes; 2) a cognitive task of interpreting the visual information, relating the received information with the readers own general knowledge, and reconstructing the meaning that the writer had meant to convey. To achieve these two levels of reading is by no means an easy job. Besides linguistic knowledge, readers have to know some cultural background knowledge. The role of cultural background knowledge in language comprehension has been formalized as schema theory. According to this theory, comprehending a text is an interactive process between the readers cultural background knowledge and the text. Efficient comprehension requires the ability to relate the textual material to ones own knowledge. In some cases, we may read an article with some new words or new structures in it, but we can guess the meaning of the article based on our knowledge about the topic without too much difficulty. It can be seen that ones cultural knowledge plays a more important role than new words and new structures in reading comprehension. For example, in Unit 3 of College English Integrated Course 3 (2001年7月第一版) there is a sentence: Being a teacher is being at the creation, when the clay begins to breathe. Every word is easy to understand. But if the teachers dont explain, the students may not understand the meaning of the whole sentence. Thats because the students dont know the legend of the God who created human beings in the “Bible”. However, teachers usually emphasize much on linguistic knowledge and pay little attention to cultural background knowledge. And students are encouraged to expand their vocabularies and to gain greater control over complex syntactic structures so as to improve reading comprehension. Consequently, many EFL learners are still unable to read effectively, and frequently fail to comprehend sentences or texts, although they know each word and each sentence structure. For instance, there is a sentence “.to learn more about a man who was in many ways, an African-American Moses.” In Text A, Unit 2 of College English Integrated Course 3 (2001年7月第一版), how to understand it then? Most of learners felt so puzzled. But words and sentence structure are both so simple, what caused their failure to understand it? Its the cultural knowledge about “Moses”. Then it commonly acknowledged that without learning culture relative to a given topic, comprehension will be difficult or impossible. In fact, the special word has become “stumbling blocks” to language study. (李兰兰，2001）Another example, in the dialogue of “Britain and Ireland”, the high volumes of teaching material, Book2. The dialogue itself is very easy:Zhoulan: Are you English?David: No, Im not.Zhoulan: But you speak English.David: Thats correct.Zhoulan: Where are you from then? Canada?David: No, Im from Britain.Zhoulan: But I thought you said you werent English.David: Right, Im British, but Im not English. Zhoulan: What are you then?David: Im Scottish, Im from Scotland.Zhoulan: Wheres that?David: Its to the north of England; its a part of Britain.Zhoulan: Have you got a map to show me? Im puzzled. Why does Zhoulan feel puzzled in this dialogue? Thats because she didnt know the background knowledge about Britain and England. Although England and Britain sometimes can replace “the United Kingdom”, strictly speaking, English means people of England, because England is a part of Britain. It cant represent people from Scotland, Wales and Ireland. So in this dialogue, if students have relative background knowledge, they can have a good comprehension. From the above discussion, it can be concluded that linguistic deficiency is but one of the factors that might have caused students poor reading comprehension. As Goodman once said reading was “a psycholinguistic guessing game”. It is the lack of cultural background knowledge that is the major element affecting their comprehension. Therefore, in English language classes teachers should introduce relative cultural knowledge so that students equipped with such knowledge will be able to guess meaning from the printed page. 2.5 Culture and Listening Comprehension Listening is the basic skill of mastering a language, and it is the main form of the language activity as well. For the importance of listening, a famous British scholar, T.Winegrad, pointed out: In all the communication activities, the most basic ability is the one to understand other peoples speaking. For English learners, listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating are their five basic abilities. According to the statistics of an American professor, an adult in the communicative activities, spend 45% of the time in listening, 30% on speaking, 16% on reading and only 9% on writing. However, listening may be the most difficult ability under students control in English teaching, because this ability has a very close relationship with students level of skills, psychological qualities as well as cultural background knowledge. All the foreign language learners may have such a experience: Even though they do have a certain degree of ability to understand a foreign language recording, but sometimes it is also difficult for them to understand what the speaker says and the content of some listening materials. This obstacle mainly stems from the cultural differences, because language is the carrier of culture. It is the most important part of culture. Peoples words and deeds are all consciously or unconsciously reflect a certain kind of culture. Because each social group has its own language, rituals, customs, religious beliefs, social systems, and lifestyles, etc. All of these constitute the cultural differences. Neglecting the cultural differences will lead into mutual misunderstanding and hinder the communication. For instance, in the “ English Listening Entry ” （张民伦，等编，P109), there is a paragraph,“110,000,000 shares were trade on Monday on the New York Exchange. The Dow-Jones average of industrial stocks was up more than 21 points today, and more major banks in the United States have reduced their prime leading rates 13.5%.” If listeners lack necessary cultural background knowledge about American stock market, they will surely feel incomprehensible about Dow-Jones Average, thus affecting the understanding of the whole material. Dow-Jones Average is an average price which calculated by 30 kinds of major industrial shares in New York Stock Exchange. It is used to measure the performance of the New York stock market indicators. It was counted by Dow-Jones & Company, so it was named after him. Any language must be rooted in specific cultural matrix. Therefore, the language reflects such common and user-friendly things in the Anglo-American country. Once they leave their specific cultural environment, Chinese people will consider them as “Double dutch”. So it will make students face up many difficulties in the listening comprehension process. Another example, during the Gulf War a few years ago, the VOA broadcast once said, “The path to November uphill all the way.” Here, the “November” was a key word which referred to the presidential election to be held in November. Obviously, if the listener does not understand the information conveyed from this sentence. It is obvious that the relationship between culture and listening is very close, and the impact of culture background knowledge on the listening comprehension is also profound.2.6 Culture and Translating Speaking of translation, many EFL learners tend to hold that it is mere inter-lingual transformation. Bit its not the case. As discussed above, language is the carrier of culture, so translation is in nature an intercultural activity. Nowadays, translation is even regarded as intercultural communication or acculturation by many experts. Culture plays such an important role in translation. So cultural teaching should never be neglected in translating courses. Some people believe that words or texts in one language can be accurately translated into another as long as the translators use a good bilingual dictionary. Unfortunat