英语教学中的文化差异 [2]
论文作者:佚名论文属性:短文 essay登出时间:2009-04-21编辑:黄丽樱点击率:9675
论文字数:3771论文编号:org200904212103381953语种:英语 English地区:中国价格:免费论文
关键词:English educational scaleeconomic constructionculture differenceEnglish teachingprimary school
nother example, once an American student who was learning in China drew a picture. He asked a Chinese drawing teacher to give some advice on his drawing, the Chinese artist agreed and said modestly, “Actually I don’t know much about drawing” So the American student asked back his drawing and said, “Oh, you are not an expert artist. I won’t let you give advice.” The Chinese artist felt much awkward. In this case, misunderstanding occurred. Besides, there are big differences between China and Western countries in congratulations, compliments, addressing people, refusing, leave-taking, customs, thinking patterns, so on and so forth.
There is a third example: A Chinese student A wants his American teacher B to do him a favor, he put it in this way, eventually he failed:
A: Are you busy recently, professor B?
B: Yes, very, I have been working on an English play that will be put on next week.
A: …
Misunderstandings like these often occur in the communication between the Chinese learners of English and the English-speaking people. These sentences spoken by the Chinese students are all correct-no grammatical mistakes at all. However, why did the foreigner misunderstand the Chinese students so that the communication failed? I kept thinking about it, finally I traced it out: it was the culture transfer.
Part Two
What is culture, then? Culture is a large and evasive concept. So there are more than 100 different definitions on culture. Yet, no scholar has given a most satisfactory definition. Sapir (1921) says, “Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is a particular how of thoughts.” Benedict says (1935) “ What really binds men together is there culture-the ideas and the standards they have in common.” The American anthropologist Douglas Brown (1987) gives the definition, “Culture is a way of life. Culture is the context with which we exist, think, feel, and relate to others. It is the ‘glue’ that binds a group if people together… Culture might be defined as the ideas, customs, skills, arts, and tools which characterize a given group of people in a given period of time.”
A language is a part of culture and a culture is a part of language, the two are closely and intricately related. Like a language, a culture has its nationality. Each nation’s culture has its own characteristics. Thus, when a learner learns a foreign language, sometimes the transfer of its native culture will occur.
Therefore, it is enough for a foreign language learner to learn only the foreign language. He has to learn the foreign culture to learn how to speak in different social contexts in order to avoid the culture transfer, because in different cultures, the same sentence may mean different things, even one word may have different culture loads. The above-mentioned examples show culture interference. This kind of transfer will interrupt the communication between the speakers of two different culture backgrounds. Early in 1945, American linguist C. Fries put forward his view, in his book Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language that the culture factor sh ould be paid much attention to. “A thorough mastery of a language for practical communication with real understanding demands a systematic observation and recording of many features of the precise situation in which the varied sentences are used. Such a systematic observation and recording must be minute and sympathetic, not for the purpose of evaluation in terms, but in or
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