3. 1. 1 Understanding cultural background of English speaking countries
Language and culture are inseparable. Language is the carrier of culture; language communication is independent from cultural background. However, cultural differences directly impact the language communication. Traditional foreign language teaching only pays attention to teach the rules of language, but without considering the real context and cultural background. In the process of contact with English speaking people, although students often find that there are no vocabulary and grammar mistakes in their conversation, but far away from the correct context, which lead to the failure of communication. In the practice of cross-cultural communication, cultural mistakes are much more serious than the language errors, because the latter is nothing but a wrong meaning, and can’t clearly express what he wants to say. However, culture mistakes often lead to serious misunderstanding or even hostility between different peoples.
In the practical contact with people whose mother tongue is English, English learners tend to take their mother tongue’s practice into cross-culture communication, as a result, many unnecessary misunderstandings come out, which directly leads to obstacle even failure. For instance, we Chinese people when we meet each other, they have our own way of greeting, which is far different from other culture system. But when they are translated into English from the literal meaning, they come like this, “Have you eaten?”, “Where are you going?”, “How much do you earn each month?” “Are you married or single?”, “How old are you?” But when people who from English speaking countries hear those words, he will sour his cheeks. He will believe that you interference his private affairs and you are being ungracious. It is possible that his reaction is “it’s none of your business.” Consequently, in the oral English teaching, we should integrate the imparting of cultures and knowledge of the target language into the process of teaching, realizing the combination of spoken English teaching with culture teaching. The majority of non-English majors are from science and engineering courses, who have a relatively fewer knowledge of both Chinese and foreign culture. Take proverbs for example, despite the different cultural background between Chinese and English speaking people, but there exist many similar proverbs, such as “Many hands make light work(人多好办事)”, “Out of sight out of mind( 眼不见, 心不烦)”, “Where there's smoke there's fire (无风不起浪)”, and etc. However, due to culture’s great influence to language’s character, sometimes there are many differences between them. Take the literary quotation for instance, many characters and affairs come from English literature, particularly Shakespeare’s works. Another source is the legends and myths of ancient Greece and ancient Roman, as “a Pandora's box”, which means the root of tragedy, trouble, and bane, but not a useful gift. Many literary quotations are from the Bible.
In the higher stage of oral English teaching, we should put emphasis on the input of English knowledge and culture. Starting from the difference between Chinese and western culture, the teacher should focus on introducing their mode of thought, their concept of value, behavior of recognition, intercommunication relation and the way of language expressing. Comparatively, people from English speaking countries pay attention to quantitative analysis, while we Chinese think much of intuition and sense, and we are good at analyses, judge and solve problems according to experiences. Towards the same thing, people make different opinions due to their different mode of thoughts, which easily results in misunderstanding when they contact each other. For example, in the aspect of cognize, in the western countries, “each airs his own view” is respected universally, they revolt against those quirkish parlance. However, most of Chinese people dainty about connotation as well as circumbendibus. Usually, they are unwilling to express things directly. They worry their words would embarrass others, or destroy their relationship [6].
Though the learning of those differences, students strengthen their consciousness of cultural difference, and have knowledge of the westerns’ human relationship, in this way, they could communicate decently.
So, teachers should combine the language knowledge with cultural background organically in the process of teaching. We should attach great importance to the difference between Chinese and western cultures, to eliminate the communication barriers arising from cultural differences, and improve their cross-cultural communication ability by learning those euphemisms, humility words, courtesy words, taboo words and daily conversation with distinct culture characteristics, and supplemented by Idioms, English proverbs, Bible stories. When it comes to non-British majors with limited language capacity, we should strengthen their training of language strategy, which can help them maintain the smooth flow of communication channels, to achieve effective communication.
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