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in which the words appear. When using vocabulary in daily life, they cannot choose exact words to express specific meanings.

2. A Theoretical Consideration of Vocabulary Teaching and Cultural Awareness

2.1 Vocabulary and culture
Traditionally, vocabulary has been considered as individual words, which has been proved to be inadequate because vocabulary includes many units larger than individual words. For example, each of the following carries a single meaning: give up, carry out and comply with. In Dictionary of Language Testing, vocabulary is defined by lexical form, “Vocabulary refers to the total number of lexical items (single words, compound words or idioms) of a language, or (as a measure of ability) to the total number of lexical items of a target language that a user or learner knows” (Davies and Brown 45).

The final aim of learning a language is to communicate. To communicate, students must use vocabulary exactly. So in English teaching, vocabulary teaching is the fundamental and dispensable part. Due to the special and inseparable relationship between vocabulary and culture, the cultivation of cultural awareness can be achieved through vocabulary teaching and students’ communication competence could be improved. In recent years, the teaching of vocabulary has its rightful place as a fundamentally important aspect of language development. But it is quite an illusion to think that meanings of vocabulary are the same in all languages. The meanings of vocabulary items in any two languages cannot be same completely, because the people live in different surroundings with different cultures.

3. Cultivating Students’ Cultural Awareness in Vocabulary Teaching

3.1 Strategies for cultivating students’ cultural awareness in class
The cultivation of students’ cultural awareness can be achieved mainly in English class in the process of vocabulary teaching. English teaching in class is the major way to cultivate students’ cultural awareness. A sample survey about the freshmen in a key middle school indicates that 15% of students insist that their absorbing of cultural knowledge derives from text; 26% of the students believe that such knowledge comes from the teachers’ explanation of the culture beyond the textbook; while 58% of the students consider that their cultural knowledge stems from the extracurricular knowledge that they’ve acquired.

4. Conclusion

Both English teachers and students realize that culture and vocabulary are closely inter-related. Culture has strong influence on vocabulary and is reflected by vocabulary at the same time. In English teaching, teachers should attach great importance to cultural factors and integrate cultural background knowledge and information into vocabulary teaching in order to cultivate students’ cultural awareness. Vocabulary carries culture, so it is a wise and efficient way to observe a nation’s culture through vocabulary teaching.

Works Cited

Chen, D. “Cultural connotation of animal words in English and Chinese”. Aspects of Intercultural Communication. Ed. Hu, W. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. 2004. 26-28.
Davies, Alan & Annie Brown. Dictionary of Language Testing. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. 1999.