Xx学院2011届本科生毕业论文
Culture Consciousness in English Teaching
ABSTRACT
Language and culture are closely related with each other. College English learning is in fact cultural learning. In order to learn a foreign language well, one has to understand the target language culture, especially the differences between our native culture and target language culture. Therefore, college English teaching is not just training in such basic skills as listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. Most important of all is to conduct cultural teaching so as to enable students to understand the target language cultural background and enhance their cross-cultural awareness. Developing college students’ cross-cultural awareness will help them to have a better mastery and use of English and realize that learning English is also learning culture at the same time. Only in this way can they master the language in the real sense. With the economic and social development, the communication between China and the outside world is increasingly frequent. People have more opportunities to contact foreign cultures. Culture teaching is playing an important role in college English teaching. The study focuses on the cultivation of college students’ cultural awareness in college English teaching and aims at explaining how to effectively promote the target culture learning in a non-native context like China through adopting various ways of cultivating college students’ cultural awareness.
Keywords：culture cultural consciousness culture teaching
I
Xx学院2011届本科生毕业论文
英语教学中的文化意识
摘 要
语言与文化密切相关，大学英语学习实际上是一种文化学习，要学好英语就必须了解其文化，尤其要熟悉本族语与英语文化之间的差异。因此，大学英语教学不仅是培养听、说、读、写、译等基本技能，更重要的是要进行文化教学，让学生了解所学语言的文化背景，培养跨文化意识。培养学生跨文化意识有助于学生更好地掌握和运用英语，使他们认识到英语学习同时也是文化学习，只有这样才能真正掌握英语这门语言。
随着经济和社会的发展，我国和世界的交流日益频繁，人们有了更多的机会接触外国文化，文化教学在外语教育中的重要性逐渐显现出来。本研究把关注的焦点放在大学英语教学中文化意识的培养之上，目的是诠释如何在缺乏英语环境的情况下通过在教学中采用不同的方法以行之有效地促进中国大学生对英语及其文化的学习。
关键词：文化 文化意识 文化教学
II
Xx学院2011届本科生毕业论文
CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ................................................................................ I 摘 要 ....................................................................................... II 1 Introduction ......................................................................... 1 2 The Relationship between Language and Culture .......... 2
2.1 Language-and-Culture ..................................................................................................... 2 2.2 Language to Learn Culture .............................................................................................. 2 2.3 Language to Participate in the Cultural Experience ..................................................... 3
3 English Teaching and Culture Awareness of the Classroom3.1 Schools and Classrooms as Communicative Environment ............................................ 5 3.2 Culture Consciousness and English teaching ................................................................. 6
4 Current Situation of English Teaching in China ............. 7
4.1 Current situation ............................................................................................................... 7 4.2 Culture teaching in China ................................................................................................ 7
5 Suggestions for Cultivating Cultural Consciousness .... 10
5.1 Education Policy and Curriculum Adjustment ............................................................ 10 5.2 Syllabus Design................................................................................................................ 10 5.3 Cultural Consciousness Cultivation at Curricular Stage ............................................ 11 5.4 What to teach................................................................................................................... 11
6 Conclusion ......................................................................... 13 References ................................................................................ 14 Acknowledgements ................................................................. 15
III
5
Xx学院2011届本科生毕业论文
1 Introduction
Cultivation of cultural consciousness became a part of foreign language education. More and more college English teachers have come to realize its critical role in college English teaching. Efforts have been made to integrate culture elements into language classes. However, despite the blossoming development in culture teaching in college English teaching in China, there seems a big discrepancy between theoretical researches and the actual practice.
Both college teachers and students are not satisfied with the current culture education in universities. Worst of all, the current culture education in college English teaching makes negative contribution to students’ personality development. Due to the perennial practice of test-oriented education in China, they are good at memorizing and imitating; on the other hand, they suffer from poor logic thinking and cultural quality. This teaching model is characterized by learner centeredness and learning-centeredness. By learning-centeredness, it means the idea that teaching process is as important as teaching content; therefore, teachers are supposed to create or adopt various teaching methods that stimulate learners’ enthusiasm and creativity in college English class activities.
In China, the goal of tertiary English teaching is to ensure linguistic competence. The theory of language, grammar and vocabulary are very thoroughly presented while the English culture is deliberately avoided for fears of cultural imperialism. The consequence is low motivation among undergraduates and memorizing without understanding. It is common understanding of researchers and professionals that language is inseparable from culture. If learners intend to master a linguistic system, they have to grasp first its culture, of which language is a major carrier and medium; if learners want to use a foreign language, they have to learn to communicate with other individuals in a new cultural context. However, there are still some policy-makers and administrators who either ignore the concept or deny its validity. Without access to a general picture of the English—speaking world, students have little perceptual knowledge of English and hence low motivation in college English learning. In effect, cultural ineptitude can affect detrimentally both students’ capacity for successful language acquisition as well as their personal and general educational growth.
1
Xx学院2011届本科生毕业论文
2 The Relationship between Language and Culture
2.1 Language-and-Culture
In the culture, the language is literally everywhere. Anyone immersed in the culture sees and hears the language all around. In this context language and culture are clearly fused: one reflects the other. Recently, language educators have attempted to coin new words to reflect this fusion: linguaculture (Krarnsch 1989；Fantini, 1995), languaculture(Agar,1994) or language-and-culture (Byram and Morgan, 1994). The latter one is the term the paper will use. Language-and-culture conveys both unification and separation.
It acknowledges that we can deal with each separately and both together. To state the obvious, language embodies the products, practices, perspectives, communities, and person of a culture. To fully reveal the culture, we must examine the language. Language is a product of the culture, as any other, but it also plays a distinct role. Members of the culture have created the language to carry out all their cultural practices, to identify and organize all their cultural products, and to name the underlying cultural perspectives in all the various communities that comprise their cultures. The words of the language, its expressions, structures, sounds, and scripts reflect the culture, just as the cultural products and practices reflect the language. Language, therefore, is a window to the culture.
To practice the culture, we also need language. We need to be able to express ourselves and to communicate with members of the culture as we engage with them in the myriad practices and products that make up their way of life. Moreover, we need to do this appropriately, using the right language in the right way, according to the expectations of the members of the culture. This is the language of self-expressions, communication, and social interaction. It is based on direct experience in the culture and interactions with members of the culture, in all the complexity this entails.
2.2 Language to Learn Culture
Language is the central means of learning culture in the language classroom. In the language classroom, as in the culture at large, the language is also everywhere. You find it in the textbooks, audiotapes, videos, books, newspapers, magazines, movies and in the words exchanged between and among students and teachers. The culture is also present in many of these same materials, especially if they are authentic language material, used by members of the culture.
In the classroom context, however, language and culture tend to be distinct and heated
2
Xx学院2011届本科生毕业论文
separately. While this perhaps has the disadvantage of providing an incomplete portrait of language-and-culture, the separation also has all undeniable advantage. Language and culture can be separated for pedagogical reasons. First of all, learners do benefits by concentrating only on mastery of linguistic forms including the cultural dimension could add unnecessary complexity. Second and most relevant to culture, we use language to learn culture, a separation that helps language learners. The language we use to learn culture is specialized. It is the language of the classroom, where culture is the topic and language the means to comprehend, analyze, and respond to it. To achieve this, four language functions are needed: language to participate in the culture, 1anguage to describe the culture, language to interpret the culture，and language to respond to the culture. These four functions mirror the stages of the cultural experience cycle: participation, description, interpretation, respondence —knowing how, knowing about, knowing why, and knowing oneself. In order to learn culture though experience, therefore, we need to use certain kinds of language at each step along the way.
2.3 Language to Participate in the Cultural Experience
This language derives from the five dimensions of the culture and is represented in the classroom through the cultural experience. The cultural experience can consist of any representation of the culture in which 1earners engage through listening, speaking, reading, writing, observing or doing. The culture presented can be products, practices, perspectives, communities or persons. The paper will use the term cultural text to define any representation of the culture that is presented in the language classroom such as reading a passage, watching a film, preparing or eating food, participating in a role-play, writing a language journal, performing a folk dance, singing songs, or listening to a speech or teacher’s anecdotes about the culture different.
Consider poetics as a cultural text. This features the language-and-culture needed to participate in cultural practices, where people need to express themselves, communicate, and carry out the affairs of their shared way of life. In the language classroom, the language of participation is removed from the cultural context in which it occurs. There are exceptions of course but for the most part the language to participate is modified to fit the classroom. It is tailored according to the curriculum, students’ background and knowledge, their level of proficiency and other factors. This language-and-culture is condensed, simplified, excerpted or otherwise modified so that learners can manage it. This modification is accomplished through activities that replicate social interactions in the culture: dialogues, role-plays, simulations, interviews, games or other activities that feature communication in the manner of members of the culture. In addition, other kinds of classroom based activities incorporate the language of participation. These include activities in which the language is used for self-expression or
3
Xx学院2011届本科生毕业论文
communication, such as asking questions, giving answers, or discussing what happened on the weekend. Regardless of the activities, in order to master the language of participation, learners need to practice in manipulating linguistic forms. This is often best achieved by separation language from culture, especially at lower levels of proficiency.
Again, this aspect of language is commonly referred to as functions-language functions or communicative functions. Functions emphasize the purposes that language serves for people of the culture, such as greeting, complimenting, story-telling, or thanking, the specific language that we use to carry out functions depends, of course, on the social situation, the people involved, the topics at hand and other factors. Knowing and choosing the appropriate language is essential to functions. Keep it in mind that verbal language is just one of many means of communication that people use in these situations. Gestures, facial expressions, eyes contact, touching, physical distance, silence and other factors all play all important role in functions. But for the moment, let us concentrate on written and spoken language.
4
