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Roles Teachers Play in Culture Teaching1.0 IntroductionHan Yu, a great essay writer of Tang Dynasty said that a teacher is the one who gives you knowledge, starts your career, and answers your questions. The civilization of human being is created by all people as a whole. From the beginning of human society, people have wanted to pass their knowledge on to their descendants, the knowledge included all civilized realizations, science, art, literature, religion, superstition, economy, politics and wars are some of them. Our ancestors had realized that these knowledge are the source of many material and spiritual happiness. In order not to hinder the process of their exploring the world and acquiring new knowledge, they appointed some specially designated people to conduct this process of passing on knowledge. These people taught what they knew to the students, and helped them find the ways to acquire knowledge. Any teaching process had a cultural background which influences the results of teaching and learning. Different teaching patterns have different outcomes. And different cultural background develops different nature of nations. Culture has always been passed on spontaneously from generation to generation as the soul of the nation, which has always been naturally melted into the process of teaching, especially in foreign language teaching. By second language acquisition we mean the mastering of words, grammar, idioms, and more deeply, knowledge about the society, literature, art, economy, politics, and other respects of the culture of the country or the nation which speaks this language. Culture teaching or culture learning is the way through which foreign language acquiring process could reach the most expected goals. It was from the new achievements of the study of the relation between language and culture that the conception of culture teaching was put forward. In the 1880s, scholars of France, Britain and Germany pointed out that as an important part of language teaching, culture teaching should be guaranteed through several ways. The Silent Language, the representative work of Edward T. Hall marked the beginning of cross-cultural communication. He held the ideas that teaching the culture or living of a nation could not merely be attached to the teaching of language as a less important part without any influence to the aim of teaching process. Instead, it should be a part as important as any other part of the process and could not be neglected. The conception of culture teaching came to be known by Chinese in 1990s, by which we mean the principles and methods of fusing language teaching and knowledge about the culture and cultural background of the target language country or nation. For example, in English teaching, Chinese teachers intend to teach the history, geography, and custom of English spoken countries as well as English words, pronunciation and grammar, aiming to help the students to understand what they learn comprehensively. This thesis aims to explain the roles teachers play in culture teaching and what teachers should do in performing these roles. In this thesis, a brief introduction to culture teaching is made at first, which can help clarify the understanding of culture teaching. Then an attempt is made to illustrate the necessity of culture teaching in foreign language teaching on basis of the theory of Acculturation and the theory of Comprehensible Input and Output. Then the significance and contents of culture teaching are discussed, and the principles and some guidelines are put forward. Finally, the roles teachers play and the strategies to perform these roles well are explored in details.2.0 An Introduction to Culture Teaching2.1 Literature ReviewIn this part two kinds of theories, which are connected with culture teaching, are given to help prove the feasibility and necessity of culture teaching.2.1.1 AcculturationJohn Schumanns (1960) theory of acculturation indicates that a process of adapting to the culture of the target language society accompanies the process of second language acquisition. It is the process of understanding the new cultures ideas, belief, emotion system and social intercourse system.Brown (2000) divided the acculturation of second language acquisition into four periods: Firstly, excitation and happiness at the beginning of coming into contact with an unfamiliar culture. Secondly, culture shock and the resistibility against the target language culture. Thirdly, gradually relaxed culture stress. Fourthly, assimilation. Among which culture shock and culture stress are two processes one has to go by from engaging a new culture to adapting to it. Chinese culture is extremely different from western cultures. Chinese students hold more complicated culture shock and culture stress. So it will be more difficult for Chinese teachers to help the students separate themselves from culture shock and culture stress.Schumann (1960) gave out two kinds of language learners, one kind of them regard the target language community as their goals, and they expect to be totally assimilated by its living patterns and values. The other kind of language learners only hope to be socially united with the target language society while they are unwilling to be totally assimilated by its living patterns and values. Schumann emphasized that both kinds of acculturation can help promote the development of second language acquisition.Social distance describes in what level are language learners accepted by the target language community. It is the main factor affecting the level of acculturation and level of second language acquisition.Psychological distance describes how the language learners themselves feel about the target language and its society. It is related to the level of adapting to the learning tasks.When language learners acquire second language under natural language circumstances, the influence of social distance seems more obvious than that of psychological distance. While in foreign language teaching circumstances, the learners are not able to come into contact with the target language community directly. And the influence of social factors will be less obvious than that of psychological factors. Then it will be an important and difficult task to help the language learners overcome language shock and culture shock, chose appropriate learning motive and cut across psychological barriers, which is the core of acculturation.Culture teaching focuses on teaching culture and respects connected with culture. The theory of social distance and psychological distance help people realize what they lack in teaching. And at last, the elimination of social distance and psychological distance may be achieved by performing systematic culture teaching.2.1.2 Comprehensible Input and Comprehensible OutputKrashens (1955) input hypothesis mainly focused on the importance of comprehensible input in language acquisition. Krashen denied that output has direct influence on language learning. But Michael Long (1982) thought that second language learners should constantly revise their expressions by talking with other learners in this target language and using what they learn. This kind of output training should be regarded as the guarantee of language acquisition in making input comprehensible.Trample (1992) thought that language acquisition is actually a process in which input and output influence each other, and learners test their understanding about their input in the process of performing output.Comprehensible output can promote second language acquisition in three aspects: Firstly, noticing/triggering. Language output help the learners notice what they lack in their language system and then start the process of revising. Secondly, hypothesis testing. Second language learners may regard the process of language output as a test of their language system. Thirdly, metalinguistic function. Language output has metalinguistic function when learners review their use of the target language they learn.Foreign language teaching in most Chinese universities failed to balance input and output. That is why Chinese students cannot speak English or other foreign languages properly and fluently after 10-12 years of learning. So as to promote foreign language teaching in universities, language output training should be paid great attention to.Culture input is the basis of culture teaching. Teachers introduce the culture of target language society and students receive it and try to understand it. But in most circumstances culture shock and culture stress may destroy their eagerness of learning. Teachers should guide the students to output what they learn about foreign culture, which can avoid culture shock and culture stress naturally, and then the expected results of culture teaching may be grasped.2.2 What is Culture TeachingTeaching in narrow sense indicates to the process of the transmission of knowledge and information from one person to another. Its directions are not regularized.Culture teaching is a foreign language teaching method or a part of foreign language teaching which claims that foreign language teaching is not merely the teaching of words and grammar, nor merely focusing on language itself. In language learning, most language learners often show little interest in insipid words and grammar. What they really enjoy is usually the historical stories, living custom, literature, art and many other interesting aspects of the culture of the target language society. They tend to discover the similarities and differences between two cultures and enjoy this process and it will produce positive contributions to their acquiring the target language and the culture background knowledge at the same time in one single course. Consequently it is believed that knowledge about the culture of the target language society should be introduced in language teaching. The ultimate aim of foreign language teaching is the realization of effective results of cross-cultural communication. To reach this goal, teaching methods of simply instructing the way of memorizing words and grammar are definitely invalid. The acquisition of language is doomed to accompany the development of thought, and the memorizing-based learning could never give birth to profound thoughts. In most circumstances, language learners of this kind of teaching patterns could use the target language to communicate, but only on surface lays, such as greetings and salutations. As for more complicated lays such as expressing opinions or depicting things, they would feel restricted because of lack of thoughts. When communicating with native speakers, they may feel confused by the native speakers idioms or paradoxes, or encounter difficulties in understanding remarks containing allusions. All the problems above are because of the lack of culture teaching. 2.3 Significance of Culture TeachingCulture teaching is one of the most profound teaching methods which proposes to teach the concentrated civilization of a nation or a society all in a limited teaching process. It is necessary for any foreign language teaching because most foreign language learners would get bored without it and surely the results of language teaching would never be ideal. The ultimate goal of foreign language teaching is the social cultural ability or the ability of cross-cultural communication. Each expression put the focus on culture, which we have been neglecting for a long time. As long as the students personality and thought develop as well as the language ability, then we can say that the culture teaching has achieved its purposes, while without culture teaching, language teaching would stay just on the surface of language, and fail to realize the function of language as the carrier of culture. Rado said that it is impossible to teach language well unless the cultural background is well grasped. Chinese students often pay too much attention to the surface part of language and neglect the deep substances of culture, for example, a famous battery brand could not be translated as white elephant because it means things that are big and useless, but there are exceptions such as paper tiger, which was invented by a great man Chairman Mao. Cultural divergences like this may block the regular communication between China and other countries, and the implement of effective culture teaching in foreign language teaching may solve this problem and promote the communication. As Confucius said, “when three people walk together, there is always at least one can be my teacher.” This means that one with unique and not generalized knowledge or information can be the teacher of others who have no access to this specified knowledge or information despite the age, sex, status, even level or standard of knowledge. Actually, the process of teaching is concisely the process of information sharing, by which human being has been taking advantage of and inheriting their wisdom for thousands of years. As early as in the primitive society of thousands of years ago, people from different tribes had begun to communicate with each other, the communication included several aspects, trade, war, relation by marriage are some of them, the effect of all these needed a joint language to guarantee, so teaching of second languages became necessary. Without doubt, language teaching of that time was not mature. It could merely meet the need of daily communication, such as buying and selling. As history forges ahead, the need of language teaching grew deep and urgent, it came into the fields of economy, politics and military relations between countries and nations, and language teaching became complicated. Language is the carrier of culture while culture is the source of language, and each culture background gives born to its own language pattern and custom. Thinking is the linkage between language and culture, which is performed by people as language speakers. People of different language environment usually have different ways of thinking. They think from different points of view and under different assumptions. Though the results may be all the same, the processes differ. That is the influence culture exerts on language speakers. In foreign language teaching, this kind of phenomenon could be seen frequently and commonly. For example, Chinese consider in others position while Westerners are quite on the contrary, so Can I help you? sounds more natural than Do you need help? to them. Chinese greet others with sentences like Have you ate your meal? Where are you going? and Are your family all right? They do not mean to spy anyone about where he is going or what he had for breakfast since they are merely greetings ensuring that they have something to say rather than to stand silently, while westerners would feel offended by being asked like this. They would consider the questioner impolite and rude for meddling in their private matters. Arabians are warmhearted while English are individual, so if they met and talked, one would keep approaching and the other drawing back, so their meeting place would be a line. In most countries, nodding ones head means consenting and shaking means disagreeing, while in some Arabian countries they are just on the contrary, nodding ones head means disagreeing and shaking means consenting, so misunderstanding may appear in conversations between people of these Arabian countries and people from other places. Chinese is a different nation which has no belief to any religion. They do not believe in God, Buddha, Allah or any other spirit. Confuciuss theories are only a system of criterion which can guide peoples behavior or give advices, not a kind of belief in peoples mind, and it is quite a pity that under many circumstances and situations it is totally invalid if people mean not to follow it. So actually Chinese enjoy more freedom in thinking and behaving. Feudal dynasties set up laws under the principle of Confuciuss theories, aiming to restrain the citizens behavior in two ways, one from the mandatory of the laws; the other from the self-control of the citizens. The facts proved that this means achieved quite successful effects, except for some unstable historical periods. Anyway, the Chinese culture seemed to be influenced by this political pattern, that is, nothing but a kind of exterior restraint could influence peoples words and deeds. People intend to do or not to do something only according to whether the public opinion would criticize them or not, without this public opinion, their words and deeds would be all in a chaos. What Chinese fear most is being shameful, so western scholars call Chinese culture shame culture. Unlike Chinese, most Europeans have religion belief. Most Europeans who have religion belief believe in God. God believes that everyone is guilty. Europeans believe that their ancestors, Adam and Eve ate the forbidden apple, and were driven away from Eden by God. This original guilt determined that everyone is born with guilt. They must do good deeds all their life and only by atoning for their crimes could they be saved.This realization is mainly practiced by their acknowledgement of their guilty nature, so Europeans have a system of principles in their mind and they guide their own words and deeds all by themselves. They fear committing additional crimes intentionally or accidentally. This kind of interior self-restraint may be more effective. This cultural pattern is quite civilized but somewhat self-focusing. It is commonly studied as Guilt Culture. Elements of culture including language, literature, art, music and many other aspects of both Eastern countries and Western countries are consummated and developed in different circumstances and environment of totally different cultural patterns respectively, so enough attention must be paid to the introduction of culture in the field of cross-cultural communication, especially in foreign language teaching. 2.4 Contents and Principles of Culture Teaching Some basic contents in carrying out culture teaching are as follows. Culture introduction; Teachers should give introduction of the culture of the target language society including aspects such as living customs, social intercourse etiquette, and social taboos and so on. And then teachers can compare these aspects with Chinese customs, etiquette and taboos so as to shorten the social distance and psychological distance between the students and the target language culture. Literature analyzing; Literature is the carrier of culture, reading and analyzing literature works will contribute greatly to culture learning. Media scanning; Multimedia in classroom have been widely equipped in schools. Teachers should show the students how to make good use of them, such as to watch foreign news broadcasts and other programs that will do good to the improving of their language skill. These contents of culture teaching should be realized under four principles. Firstly, principle of cognition which decides that the aim of culture teaching is to give cognition of foreign language culture and it should be an important part of language teaching, Secondly, principle of relating. What teachers teach about the culture should be tightly related to the curriculum; otherwise the process of culture teaching will be unnecessary and invalid. Thirdly, principle of comparison and contrast. The core of culture teaching is the comparison and contrast between two cultures during teaching process. Fourthly, principle of suiting. The process of culture teaching should fit the age bracket characteristics, cognitive ability, psychological condition, language skill and so on.3.0 Guidelines for Culture TeachingCulture learning is actually a process consisting of several stages. Learners perform according to these learning phase
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