On Cultivating Culture in Middle School English Teaching.doc

毕业论文(设计)AcknowledgementsI wish to express my thanks and appreciation to my tutor, Mrs. Zhong Xiao, whose careful reading and suggestions have been invaluable to me throughout my thesis writing. Without her help, this thesis would never have come to the present stage. My thanks should also be given to all the teachers who have taught me my BA courses. Without their enthusiasm and support, this work would not have been possible. I am also grateful to my classmates and roommates for their psychological support and encouragement. In particular, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to my friend Zeng Yinjuan. Without her support and constant encouragement, the completion of my present paper would not have been possible.AbstractWith the development of globalization，China entering into WTO and the coming Olympic Games in 2008, international contacts have become more and more frequent. Our society is in great need of personnel who have a good command of knowledge and are able to communicate with people from different countries. How to make English teaching meet the needs of social and economic development has become an urgent task to English educators. Therefore, developing students intercultural communicative competence has been paid much attention in English teaching. Nowadays, it has been prescribed into the New English Curriculum Standards. Obviously, middle school English teachers are facing the challenge of exploring appropriate means of culture instruction in their teaching contents. However, because of the testing system, teachers academic proficiency, students attitude and so on, culture introduction has been ignored in middle schools and students intercultural competence is poorly developed. Since language and culture are inseparable，one cannot master the spirit of a foreign language without knowing its culture. Culture teaching should be given priority in English teaching. In the hope of improving culture teaching in middle school English classes, practical principles and effective techniques are suggested. In this article, the author proceeds with the understanding of culture, then combines with the teaching practice as a intern in Wuhua Middle School to introduce some useful methods and ways through analyzing the differences between Chinese and Western cultures, discusses how to help students to learn culture differences at the beginning of English learning and how to relate Chinese and Western culture differences with language differences so as to develop students cultural sensitivity and their abilities to use various ways of communication flexibly, so as to enable students to carry out intercultural communication with English.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 cultivate or incorporate some cultural elements, which are related with language itself. In a word, the positive result of the study shows that teaching target culture and cultivating students cultural awareness in English teaching is not only helpful to solve the existing problems in English teaching in Chinese secondary schools, but also significant to the individual development of the secondary school students.Key Words: intercultural communicative competence English teaching intercultural awareness culture摘 要随着全球化的发展，中国进入，年北京奥运会的临近，国际间的交流越来越频繁。我们的社会需要大量具有跨文化交际能力的全面的外交人才。如何使英语教学迎合社会经济发展的需求已经成为了英语教师的迫切任务，因此，在英语教学中发展学生的跨文化交际能力受到了更多的关注，如今已被写入新英语课程标准，中学英语教师面临着文化与英语语言知识教学的新挑战，然而，由于测试系统，教师的学术水平及学生的态度等诸多问题，文化导入被忽略，学生的跨文化交际能力得不到发展和提高。语言与文化密不可分，不了解英语文化也就不能真正掌握这门语言。文化教学必须在中学英语教学中上升到一定高度。为了改善中学英语教学的文化教学，本文提出了一些实践的原则和有效的方法。本文从文化的认识入手,结合自身在五华中学实习的教学实践引入一些有用的方法，通过分析中西文化的不同，讨论如何在英语的初学阶段帮助学生了解文化的不同，以及如何掌握中西语言和文化的关系，以此来培养学生的文化感知能力以及他们灵活运用各种方法进行交流的能力，使学生用英语进行跨文化交流。中学的英语教学并不仅是对句法结构的讲解和学习新的词语和表达，而是需要培养和融入与语言相关的文化因素。总而言之，在中学英语教学中始终贯穿文化的导入和渗透，不仅能改善我们英语教学的不良现状，而且能使学生的语言能力直接变为交际能力，促进其个人的全面发展。关键词：跨文化交流能力 英语教学 跨文化意识 文化 ContentsAcknowledgements.iAbstract (English).iiAbstract (Chinese).ivContents.v1. Introduction.11.1 Research purpose.11.2 Research background.11.2.1 Researches abroad.11.2.2 Researches at home.32. Language and culture.32.1 What is language.32.2 What is culture.42.3 The relationship between language and culture.53. The current situation of intercultural awareness cultivation in middle school English teaching.63.1 Teachers attitude to the intercultural awareness cultivation.63.2 Students attitude to the intercultural awareness cultivation.83.2.1 Students motivation.83.2.2 Students competence.94. The necessity of intercultural awareness cultivation in middle school.114.1 The requirement of syllabus.114.2 The requirement of present teaching materials.125. The application of the principle of intercultural awareness cultivation.14 5.1 The principle of grading.145.2 The principle of adaptability .155.3 The principle of practicability.156. The approaches of teaching intercultural awareness cultivation.16 6.1 Teaching intercultural awareness cultivation in classroom166.1.1 Adopting role play method.166.1.2 Incorporating cultural knowledge.176.1.3 Adopting contrastive measure.186.1.4 Adopting audio-visual approach.196.1.5 Finding cultural background in the textbook.196.2 Teaching intercultural awareness cultivation outside class.206.2.1 Supplying relative cultural material.206.2.2 Organizing communicative activities.217. Conclusion.21References.24viOn Cultivating Culture in Middle School English Teaching1. Introduction1.1 Research purposeThe relationship between language and culture has been a focus of attention. Language and culture are closely related, each influencing and shaping the other. It has long been recognized that language is an essential and important part of a given culture. Language is like a vehicle of cultural transmission. Different languages may reflect different cultures, and different cultures also influence different languages. One can hardly learn a language well without knowing the 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.” Nowadays we also can see that after many years of English study, students still find it difficult to communicate with native English speakers. The reason is that they lack the knowledge of western culture. Therefore, as English teachers, we are facing one problem: cultivating students with the knowledge of culture background and improving their intercultural communicative competence in English teaching. To foster the students abilities in cross-cultural communication, it is necessary to incorporate culture into the English teaching.1.2 Research background1.2.1 Researches abroadIn foreign language education, the importance of teaching foreign culture has been widely recognized. Language educators all over the world pay much attention to teach culture in foreign language education. It is very complicated to teach culture, it 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.Researches abroad on language and culture in the past decades are various. Edward Sapir was a great expert in the early 1920s, in his work Culture, Language, and Personality, he stated that a language and the culture of its speakers cannot be analyzed in isolation. In the 1930s, Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf produced an influential theory, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis theory. Robert Lado published the work Linguistics across Cultures in 1957. He pointed out that people are trended to transfer the form, meaning and the mode of their language and culture into the target language and culture. In 1999, Eli Hinkel published his work Culture in Second Language Teaching and Learning. This book reviewed the relationship between culture, language teaching and learning by showing how cultural factors impact various aspects of second language learning.“Culture in language learning is not an expendable fifth skill, tacked on, so to speak, to the teaching of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. It is always in the background, right from the first day, 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.” (Kramsch, 1996).1.2.2 Researches at homeIn China, its just since the 1980s that scholars and experts have recognized the importance of cultural cultivating in foreign language education. In early 1980s, Mr. Xu Guozhang gave a speech titled the Cultural Connotation of Words and English Teaching and after that he published his famous work Culturally-loaded Words and English Language Teaching. It indicated that many words have different surface meanings owning to different cultural traditions. At that time some articles on cultural cultivating and foreign language teaching were published. Hu Wenzhong is commonly regarded as one of the pioneers who advocate teaching of culture in foreign language education. 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.2. Language and culture 2.1 What is language To give the simple definition, “language is a means of verbal communication.” (Hu zhuanglin, 2006:3) “Language is a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, remarks having understood meanings.” (Luo Changpei, 1989) Many animal and even plant species communicate with each other. Humans are not unique in this capability. However, human language is unique in being a symbolic communication system that is learned instead of biologically inherited. Basically, it is the symbols we use in order to communicate with one another. We all learn language, but there is something difference on account of different countries, different cultural background. We communicate with others by using different language from different countries. Even the language is same, but some words and meanings of two kinds of language are different, not the completely same. 2.2 What is cultureThe word “culture” has many different meanings. For some it refers to an appreciation of good literature, music, art, and food. "Culture: learned and shared human patterns or models for living; day-to-day living patterns. These patterns and models pervade all aspects of human social interaction. Culture is mankind's primary adaptive mechanism" (Net. 1, L.Damen) "Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, and on the other as conditioning elements of further action." (Net. 2, A.L. Kroeber)Culture, in a broad sense, is an integrated pattern of human behavior that includes thoughts, communications, languages, practices, beliefs, values, customs, courtesies, rituals and manners of interacting. As the culture is so multiplex, it pervades virtually every aspects of human life and influences peoples behavior, including linguistic behavior. It means that language is not only part of how we define culture, but it also reflects culture.2.3 The relationship between language and cultureLanguage is part of culture. Language is like a vehicle of cultural transmission. Different languages may reflect different cultures, and different cultures also influence different languages. For example, different languages may have different idioms owing to different living environments, social conventions and literature tradition, etc. 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 is easily shown by the fact that culture is transmitted from one generation to the next coming generation 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,1999:21) In short language and culture are closely related, each influencing and shaping the other. As a foreign language teacher to teach a foreign language implies to teach the relative culture. A language can never be taught in a cultural vacuum.“There are many ways in which the phenomena of language and culture are intimately related. Both phenomena are unique to humans and have therefore been the subject of a great deal of anthropological, sociological, and even emetic study. Language, of course, is determined by culture, though the extent to which this is true is now under debate. T