Cultural Transfer In Learning English Idioms For Chinese College Students

The thesis studies cultural transfer in learning English idioms for Chinese college students. Different nations have different cultural characteristics, and according to cultural transfer theory, different cultural characteristics will result in cultural transfer. The positive cultural transfer can facilitate second language learning, while the negative cultural transfer will cause many difficulties and errors. As the important part of culture, language is the reflection of culture. Through the language characteristics of one culture, we can know the affluent cultural connotations. Words are the basic elements of language, so they can reflect the cultural differences the most. Idioms, as the important part of words, contain abundant cultural connotations. They are the soul of language and also the soul of culture. The oldest languages, such as English and Chinese, have many idioms in their cultures. Due to the great cultural differences between English and Chinese and the ignorance of English cultural background knowledge, Chinese college students will transfer Chinese cultural connotations in learning English idioms, thus misunderstandings occur. This thesis is on the basis of cultural contrastive analysis on geographic environment, historical background, religion, and social value between English and Chinese idioms, doing an empirical research on learning English idioms for Chinese college students by investigating the freshmen and the junior students of four Baoding college schools. The research result will have great significance in solving the problems that occurred in English idioms learning and will provide some suggestions for Chinese college cultural teaching, which will also enrich the second language learning system.In this empirical research, the author tries to investigate through quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. The investigate subjects are several English teachers and the students from four Baoding college schools. This research adopted two methods: an interview and a questionnaire. To begin with, the author interviewed these English teachers about whether their students have the problems of cultural transfer in English study. Through this qualitative study, we can find the feasibility of doing this study and the significance of emphasizing cultural teaching. Later, the author handed out the questionnaires to investigate these college students. The two different grades students represent Chinese English learners with different cultural levels. The main purpose of this research is to investigate whether the Chinese college students have any problem in learning English idioms, whether they understand English idioms with Chinese think of pattern, and how much the cultural transfer accounts in their understanding English idioms. The research result shows that Chinese learners, no matter their cultural level, all have cultural transfer in their foreign language studying, while the junior students have fewer problems of cultural transfer than the freshmen do. Therefore, we make a conclusion that due to the ignorance of English cultural knowledge, cultural transfer will certainly occur in learning English idioms for all the Chinese students, but with the increase of cultural knowledge upgrade, the influence of cultural transfer on second language learning will become weakening. The inspiration of this research is that although the good language ability is very important for the students, the successful second language learner should also pay more attention to the cultural learning, which put forward a higher requirement for the foreign language teaching.