Chapter One Introduction
1.1 The Importance of Culture Teaching
With the globalization of the world, there are more and more communications amongpeople from different nations. “Intercultural communication is a frontier discipline thatinvolves anthropology, sociology, ethnology, linguistics, sociolinguistics, and folklore, thestudy of culture and theories and the methods in teaching foreign languages (Hu Wenzhong,1985).” Thus, correspondingly, while devoting great efforts to the integrated study of theinfluence of cultural factors on the language learners’ communicative competence, foreignlanguage educators and other scholars have started to be concerned with culture teaching.Language and culture are closely related. Culture teaching, as an important part in languageteaching, decides whether the language learners can master the language, not onlygrammatically, but also pragmatically. There are many language teaching activities inclassrooms, for instance, reading, writing, translation, listening and speaking. The contents ofthere activities are mostly about the culture. Take a reading class as an example, the teacherasks students to read the material about the “body language”. This very topic of “bodylanguage is an important symbol of a specialized culture. Same gestures are used differentlyin different cultures and nonverbal signals of different cultures may cause difficulties inlearning a foreign language. Maybe in one country direct eye contact is necessary inconversation, while in another, it is impolite just to look at the other communicator’s eyes.In foreign language teaching, culture teaching encompasses not only target culture butalso native culture. That is to say, foreign language educators should take how to use aforeign language to express one’s won culture into considerations. This should be on theaccurate understanding of both native and foreign culture. In this way, foreign languagelearners’ communicative competence can be fully acquired.
1.2 The Purpose and Significance of the Present Research
In recent years, more and more scholars at home and abroad have focused their attentionon native culture teaching. It has been mentioned in Kramsch’s Context and Culture inLanguage Teaching that the apprehension of foreign culture should base on the comparisonbetween foreign culture and native culture. Culture introduction in foreign language learningcontains the recognation of the target language and native language. (Kramsch, 1999) Zena T.Moore adopts Kramsch’s ideas that he thinks self-understanding can assist language learnersto learn target language culture and develop their cultural awareness.And in China, Professor Cong Cong points out the phenomenon that most of our Englishlearners are incompetent to express Chinese culture in English so that successful interculturalcommunication can not be achieved and she names it “Chinese Cultural Aphasia”. (从丛，英语论文范文，2017) The term “aphasia” is usually called DYSPHASIA (Encyclopedia Britannica,1974-1984), referring to a disorder caused by damage to the parts of the brain that areresponsible for understanding and using language. Symptoms are caused by the location andextent of brain tissues involved. In some cases, people with aphasia also find it difficult tounderstand the spoken and written word.In China, “aphasia” is borrowed by Professor Cong Cong in her “Chinese CulturalAphasia” to refer to the phenomenon of students’ inc，英语论文
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