From another point of view, culture usually means the totality of substantial wealth and spiritual wealth that human beings have created in the process of the development of history in society. In a concrete sense, if culture is classified according to its connotations, its different features and roles, it can be divided into the following four categories. The first one is Substantial Culture (S.C.). It refers to the substance, the production activities and the products, which human beings have in their long-term process of transforming the objective world. S.C. is concrete, perceivable, and tangible. It is fundamental to all the other cultural factors. Only after they have the basic necessities of life, such as food, clothing, shelter, and transportation, can human beings be engaged in some other activities such as politics, religion, arts, etc. Therefore S.C. is something essential for human beings. It indicates how civilized a culture is and to what extent the quality of a culture has reached. The second one is System Culture. It reflects to various social relations human beings have in their process of substance production. A person occupied in social activities cannot separate himself either from any social contexts or social relations. Even a master-and-servant relation and a production relation exist between Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday, though they have been isolated on a desert island. The relations come into being when human beings start their substance productions. These relations are acknowledged by tangible or intangible systems and are used to keep those production relationships. These are necessary principles in dealing with interpersonal relations and the relations between man and society. The law systems, political systems, economic systems and the principles for social and interpersonal relations belong to this category. The third one is Behavior Culture, which is formed during cultural creation with different ethnic or geographic modes of behaviors. It is usually represented as ethnic or regional culture with distinctive features of customs. For instance, oriental cultures have striking differences from western cultures. The former are characterized by their collectivism. The latter are known for their individualism. The fourth one is Psychoculture, which is a culture “re-cultured” in human beings’ creation of culture. Namely, it is a cultural phenomenon, which comes into being after being nurtured for a long time. It appears in the forms of social mentality and social ideology, particularly in the creation of social values [1].
1. 2 Relationship between language and culture
Many linguists want to explore the relationship between language and culture, which is an extremely complex issue to discuss. It is commonly agreed that language and culture are inseparable. On the one hand, a society’s language is one aspect of the society’s culture, and 1anguage is a part of culture and also constitutes culture. There are very few aspects of cultural life which are comprehensible without considering cultural ways of speaking (or literacy) as being an instrument of their constitution. On the other hand, language is impacted and shaped greatly by culture; it reflects culture. In a sense, culture is already deeply ingrained in the mind of human being, and language is the most salient utterance of culture. So the relation of language to culture is that of part to whole.
Language is merely a part of culture. The special feature is that language is the main tool to learn culture. People can acquire the whole culture in the process of learning and using language. From this, we can see that language and culture are closely connected; we can hardly understand and use language correctly if we know nothing about its culture. Foreigners usually say “thank you” when they are praised, while Chinese tend to express their modesty in that situation, or they would be considered as too proud. The above is the example on the issue of language and culture. As we all know, language is only one form of culture, it is impossible to learn a language well without knowing its culture. On the contrary, the deeper we know one country’s history, culture, customs and traditions, etc., the better we can use its language.
2 Culture and English language teaching
People succeed in getting the cultural knowledge by means of school education. At the same time, the acquisition of culture knowledge is also closely and inseparably related to family education, social environment and other aspects. However, for most people, cultural knowledge likes values, beliefs, customs and behavior patterns, which are usually get insensibly. Language is the carrier of culture. If there is no language, there is no culture. Of course, the changes of social and cultural are reflected by language. Language reflects a nation’s characteristics. It not only contains the nation’s historical and cultural background, but also contains the nation’s outlook on life and values. Maybe it is difficult to determine the degree of impact of the language on the culture, but through language learning, we can realize culture. Because language contains culture, and culture restrict the occurrence of the language behavior of human being. In this background, the language contains more things in addition to vocabulary, grammar, phonology and sentence pattern. It also includes a delicate mechanism which belongs to the ordinary rules of language in communication and can only be understood. In foreign language teaching, the cultural factors can be divided into cultural knowledge and communicative culture, which can be transformed into each other. To sum up, culture teaching which is emphasized in the process of foreign language teaching is determined by the inseparable relations of language and culture and the high-level purposes of foreign language learning and teaching. Therefore, culture teaching is an important and essential part of English language teaching.转贴于 酷文网-论文下载中心 http://www.coolwen.net
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