Culture and English Teaching

ＣｕｌｔｕｒｅａｎｄＥｎｇｌｉｓｈＴｅａｃｈｉｎｇ

作者：李莹

来源：《商情》2008年第35期

【摘要】There is a natural relationship between culture and language. Language reflects how the people of a nation form the unique way of life and the way of thinking. Therefore, English teaching necessarily involves cultural education as well. This paper analyzes the influence of social culture in English teaching and tries to set up a principle of teaching English culture.

【关键词】 language culture English teaching cultural influence

1. The relationship between language and culture

Culture is closely related with language. The specific culture of each nation is reflected in a variety of ways; however, there is no other thing that shows as much content of a nation's specific life style as its language. From the perspective of language and social culture, language may be regarded as a special phenomenon of social culture. The development of language also keeps a close pace with the cultural and social advancement of a nation. For example, the social changes and progress of thinking are constantly enriching the lexicon of the language. Therefore, to investigate into the social and cultural aspect and to nurture the cultural competence of language learners are two important topics of English teaching. In a sense, the learning of a second language is the understanding of a second culture. It is a process of conflicting, communicating, interacting and re-constructing. An English teacher is a bridge between the target language culture and the language learners. To the learner, the process of learning a second language is also the process of knowing the specific traditions of the people speaking that language.

2. English learning means cultural learning

Whenever talking about English learning, many people may recall the training of the four basic skills of listening, speaking reading and writing. In their teaching practices, the activities of many teachers are also limited by this methodology. Sure, teaching these basic skills is necessary because the purpose of learning a language is to use it. However, the problem is that although a lot of students have learned the fundamentals of these skills according to these traditional methods, they are still showing an obvious tendency of making mistakes of various kinds. As a result, the process of learning English not only means the training of these fundamental skills but also includes the familiarity with the social and cultural conventions of the English-speaking countries. Only in this way can learners have a good command of the English language, otherwise errors may easily arise.