Acknowledgements 16

On Fostering Cross-Cultural Awareness in Vocabulary Teaching in Middle School

I. Introduction

   The meaning of this paper consists in pointing out that cultural introduction can produce comprehensible input environment for English vocabulary teaching. On the one hand, it can improve the students’ interest in English vocabulary learning and solve the problems of vocabulary learning. On the other hand, vocabulary is the forms of language and language the largest carrier of culture. The nature of vocabulary decides the necessity of combining the vocabulary teaching with culture teaching. Under the background of cross-cultural communication, the ultimate purpose of foreign language learning is to cultivate the students’ communication ability. The application of culture introduction in vocabulary teaching has certain theoretical and practical significance in achieving the ultimate goal of foreign language teaching. This paper argues that the combination of vocabulary teaching and cultural teaching can help the students to use English vocabulary more accurate and cultivate students’ cross-cultural awareness, which eventually benefits for the improvement of students’ cross-cultural communication ability.

   At present, The published English books on grammar, vocabulary, reading and oral  have filled the bookstore shelves at home. However, works about the relationship between English and culture are rare in bookstores, works about the relationship of language or vocabulary between culture would be much less, which strike a fresh contrast to current people’ emphasis on researches on English teaching. At present, domestic English linguists has authoritative research works include the Language and Culture-cultural comparison between English and Chinese language co-authored by professors of Deng Yanchang and Liu Ruiqing, and Research on Teaching Strategies for Language and Culture professor by Chen Shen in Nanjing Normal University. The former mainly discusses the cultural differences, allusion and euphemism, taboo language, metaphor and association, term of respect and self-depreciatory expression, idioms, proverbs, aphorisms, various English variants and body language in everyday conversations by comparing the difference between the Chinese and western culture under the author’s experiences and reference for the contemporary general linguistics, social linguistics, stylistics, works related to language and culture, which are the most basic and important cultural factors in English communication. The latter discusses how to combine culture teaching and language teaching theoretically and practically. At the theoretical level, professor Chen Shen introduced the evolution process of three main language teaching models, namely mergers, integration, integrated mode and analyzed and evaluate and the theoretical basis of each model. At a practical level, it analyzed kinds of effective teaching strategies of language and culture and provided a number of specific cases. In addition, the author also put forward a multidimensional method of language and culture teaching and emphasize the cultivation of cultural creativity.

This paper consists of five chapters. Chapter One provides a brief introduction of this paper, which includes the purpose and significance of the topic and the current situation of the study, as well as the organization of this paper. Chapter Two mainly states the characteristics and the teaching methods of middle school English vocabulary, which mainly summarizes the characteristics of middle school English vocabulary and some effective teaching methods so as to improve the vocabulary learning efficiency of middle school students. In addition, the paper provides some theoretical basis for the combination of cultural teaching and vocabulary teaching. Chapter Three introduces the differences between Chinese and Western culture and their embodiment in English vocabulary. It includes the relationship between culture and language, the causes and the embodiment of cultural differences in vocabulary. Chapter Four explores cultural awareness penetration in English vocabulary teaching, including the principles of cultural consciousness infiltration and the way of cultural knowledge infiltration. Chapter Five is the conclusion of this paper. In this chapter, the major findings of the study and pedagogical implications are discussed。