- 上一篇：电影《刮痧》中的中西文化冲突
- 下一篇：《傲慢与偏见》中的婚姻观分析
The paper aims to understand the present situation of English culture teaching in middle school, to explore factors that impact high school students’ intercultural communicative competence development, and put forward feasible suggestions.
This study has significant implications. It can promote the teachers to pay more attention to English culture teaching and enhance the students’ intercultural communication competence.
There are five parts in the whole paper. The first part is the introduction part, which describes the significance of culture teaching, background of the current study, purposes and importance of the current research. In the second part, something about culture and language are presented. Part three and part four make up the major body of the paper, including the research design, instruments, the results of the study. Part five draws a brief conclusion and answers the research questions put forward before.
II. Culture and Language
In this section， the concepts of culture and the close relationship between language and culture is elaborated in detail. Culture is the unique creation of human civilization, and as the most important tool for communication, language is inherently related to culture. The close relationship between culture and language reminds that language education should include both linguistic knowledge and cultural components at the same time. The teaching for language and the teaching for culture are supposed to be proceeded simultaneously no matter where the teaching phase arrives at(Lado 89).
2.1 The Concept of Culture
It is rather difficult to define culture. There are more than three hundred definitions and interpretations about culture in the world from the perspectives of linguistics, anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy and so on.
The American anthropologist Edward Tylor offered a classical definition of culture, which is one of the most extensive and precise definitions of culture even today. He maintains that culture is a complex unity composing of knowledge, belief, art, morality, law, and other social habits developed among certain people as members of society. In 1952, two American anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckhohn listed 164 definitions of culture that they found in anthropological literatures and advanced their own definition of culture in their cooperation Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, which is regarded as the most influential definition of culture in the 20th century. Culture contains the type, explicit or implicit, concrete symbols of abstract thinking pattern, constituting the distinguished accomplishments of human beings, including their implication within artifacts; the embodiment of culture composed of traditional (i.e., historically derived and chosen) thinking and especially their conventional values; On one hand, cultural system can be deemed as products of action, on the other hand, it can be regarded as conditional tendency of further action.
2.2 Language and Culture
Language has close relation wit culture, these two issues cannot be separated. They affect each other. Language is an important part of culture and it is considered to be the keystone of culture(Brown 45). In the meantime, the formation of culture would be impossible without the long-term practice of language. Language is affected and shaped by cultural phenomena, and language reflects cultureByram(Byram 305).
2.2.1 Language as One Part of Culture
Firstly, language is a significant ingredient of culture. Now it is well-acknowledged in academic world that language is a part of culture, just as Good enough says: “a society’s language is a Facet of its culture. The relationship between language and culture is like part to the whole.” Culture is an expansive system which comprehensively includes language as a subsystem. Language is a unique part of culture. If culture is seen as an all-embracing general idea, language belongs to the general culture of human being, which is the category of culture to the macroscopic level. When a child acquires his mother tongue, he also acquires a language-specific culture and becomes socialized in certain ways. While from the angle of culture to the microscopic extent, language and culture share the same developing step, without language, culture will not exist. Language is the premise of culture’s shaping and evolution. The development of culture promotes the great development of language(Stem 69).