mportant Role of Cultural Background Knowledge in English Teaching
What should be taught in English teaching? There are different kinds of answers depending on different people. Traditional grammar- translation method holds that vocabulary, grammars and even sentence patterns should be taught in English teaching, which results in the cramming teaching of grammar and vocabulary, and the rote memorization of sentence patterns. These advocators take it for granted that once students grasp most of them, they will be a great master in English. But they neglect a factor: although it can equip students with a solid linguistic knowledge, it may produce a batch of students who are incapable of responding to the actual situation. Knowing certain knowledge about western cultural background, students can master the true thoughts and inner ideas of English language more quickly and correctly, therefore they can study and use English correctly to improve the efficiency of learning.
A. Being Helpful to English Reading.
English reading ability is a kind of comprehensive ability, there are many kinds of styles of English articles, although they know meaning of each word and have no difficulty with the structures of sentences in the process of reading, if they have no cultural background information about the article, then it is hard to understand the true meaning of the article. For example, there is a simple dialogue between zhangJuan and David from an English textbook.
ZhangJuan:---Are you English?
David:---No, I’m not.
ZhangJuan:---But you speak English.
David: ---That's correct.
ZhangJuan:---Where are you from then? Canada?
David:---No, I'm from Britain.
ZhangJuan:---But I thought you said you weren't English.
David:---Right, I'm British, but I'm not English.
ZhangJuan:---What are you then?
David:---I'm Scottish, I'm from Scotland.
ZhangJuan:---Where's that?
David:---It's to the north of England, It's part of Britain.
ZhangJuan:---Have you got a map to show me? I'm puzzled.
In this dialogue, why does ZhangJuan feel puzzled? Because ZhangJuan is lack of the cultural background knowledge about England and Britain. Usually England stands for Britain, but strictly speaking, England refers to the people of England, because England is just a part of Britain, though England has broad land, large population, it can not stand for Scotland, Wales and Ireland whose people are also本
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英语论文网www.51lunwen.org整理提供 not willing to be named England people but being happy to accept Scottish, as for British, they can accept it, this is why David says: “I am British, but I am not English. I am Scottish.” in this dialogue, if students grasp this cultural background knowledge, it is very easy to comprehend this dialogue. At this time introducing cultural background knowledge is very important and it is not necessary to explain words and grammar which are very simple. Therefore, leading cultural background knowledge is helpful to English reading.
B. Being Able to Improve the Ability of Communication
Different countries have their own habits and customs; there are many different habits and customs between English-speaking countries and China. Thus if English learners want to communicate with the foreigners effectively and correctly in daily life, they should understand the cultural background knowledge of western nations as comprehensively as possible, especially something that is different from Chin
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