論文：Cultural Background Knowledge And English Teaching

論文：Cultural Background Knowledge And English Teaching

Cultural Background Knowledge
And English Teaching


1. Introduction

Language is an important component of culture and meanwhile a carrier of culture. The relationship between language and culture is interdependent and interactive. (HuJianguo, 2006(3):55-57) So if we are going to command a language, we must acquire the peculiar cultural background knowledge of the language. Otherwise, we can’t really master the language and we may fall in misunderstanding or even breakdown in communication with the native people.
However, neither students nor teachers have enough cultural consciousness in the process of English learning and teaching. They generally hold that the teaching of cultural background knowledge is additive and supplementary to language knowledge teaching, and it is dispensable. Students usually concentrate on the learning of the language knowledge itself, such as pronunciation, grammar and le*is. They tend to neglect the crucial function of cultural background knowledge in English learning. Alt
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nglish teaching are inseparable from each other, we should pay due attention to the teaching and the acquaintance of cultural background knowledge in English teaching. Actually it is found that cultural background knowledge may facilitate English learning and teaching in the following aspects.

2.1 Facilitating Students’ Language Learning

The basic language skills include listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. Cultural background knowledge will be of great benefit to cultivate students’ language skills, especially to the comprehension of materials. Due to limited space, the author just discusses its benefits from several aspects, namely, listening, reading and translating.

Firstly, listening skill is one of the basic language skills that students must master. However, students always feel it difficult to understand the listening materials and what the native speakers speak. Even though they have spent a lot of time in practicing listening, they achieve little. The moment they encounter new materials, they still feel confused. On the one hand, it is because that they have no solid language competence, such as the small size of vocabulary, incorrect pronunciation and a bad command of grammar. On the other hand, they lack in certain cultural background knowledge, which produces many obstacles in their listening comprehension. Even when they catch every word of a sentence and know the e*act meaning of each word, they still can’t understand its real or implied meaning. In fact, sometimes the combination of the meaning of each word is meaningless. We should apprehend it as a whole. There is a dialogue between A and B as following:
A: Why didnt you come to the party last night?
B: I felt a little under the weather.
Q: Why didn’t B come to the party last night?
If you don’t understand the phrase “under the weather”, you can’t understand the correct reason of B’s absence. “Under the weather” is slang and it means that B didn’t feel well and may get sick. Its meaning is irrelevant to the word “weather”. From this e*ample, we can see that cultural background knowledge plays an important role in the comprehension of listening materials.
In addition, we can also make good use of cultural background knowledge to predict the coming contents and questions in listening materials. With cultural background knowledge, we can associate it with listening materials in advance and respond quickly to what we have heard. For e*ample, when we meet the word “Christmas” in listening, we will associate it with Santa Claus, Christmas tree and Christmas carols. Christmas Day, the 25th, December every year, is the day we celebrate as the birth of Jesus. With such cultural background knowledge, there will be a basic idea in our minds before we start to listen, so that we can concentrate on key words and language cues and then listen to the materials with specific purpose and selective attention, which is a very effective learning strategy, according to Cohen (2000).
As a result, cultural background knowledge will help us understand the materials and finally enhance our listening comprehension.

Secondly, English reading competence is a kind of integrative skill. It not only refers to language knowledge and skills, but also is influenced by many other factors, such as reading skills, strategies, reading habits and so on. However, it can’t simply depend on language knowledge. Although many people hold that the main reason that influences the reading competence is the size of vocabulary. Cultural background knowledge, however, plays a very important, sometimes even a decisive role in reading.
In reading comprehension, we may often encounter some diff ……（未完，全文共26683字，當(dāng)前僅顯示4799字，請閱讀下面提示信息。收藏《論文：Cultural Background Knowledge And English Teaching》）