Interpretive Power Of Cultural Context In English Text Implication

For nearly a century, many scholars have made significant contributions to the study of context. They have found out that context is essential in the process of language comprehension. Among the classification of context, cultural context ranks the highest level, and it is the most sophisticated. The main reason is that culture itself is a huge system. It includes material culture and non-material culture, and non-material culture involves various aspects of society, such as social system, art and literature, religion, legal system and values and so on so forth. Language and culture are closely interrelated. On one hand, language is the cornerstone of culture. As a part of it, language reflects culture, inherits culture, and spreads culture. On the other hand, in different culture systems, the connotation of language expression is different. Furthermore, the continuous development and change of culture enriches the components of language, as well as injects vitality to language, which makes language more diverse in form and meaning. Therefore, language and cultural interact with each other. Language comprehension requires certain cultural knowledge, and in turn, cultural knowledge acquisition mainly depends on language.English text is an integration of vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and cultural context, which plays an important role in English learning. Learners not only need to master basic knowledge of language, but also need to understand social culture in that language. Thus, language education can achieve the fundamental purpose of language teaching and learning, that is, to cultivate talents with high qualifications for powerful cross-cultural communication.But how? This dissertation carries its discussion out on language, cultural context, and text, etc. It is divided into five chapters. Chapter one is introduction, describing the significance of the study and research background. Chapter two is literature review, introducing context, culture and text reading respectively. Chapter three elaborates the relationship between culture and language, and the influence of cultural context on English text from aspects of natural environment, historical event, religion, custom and literature, at different levels of vocabulary, idiom, sentence, text and pragmatics through a large number of examples. Chapter four puts forward a few suggestions to cultivate cultural knowledge. Namely, to cultivate cross-cultural awareness of learners, to learn cultural knowledge in class based on the use the available resources, and to acquire culture of target language out of class which is similar to native culture acquisition. Chapter five is conclusion, which concludes the main contents of the paper, and points out some deficiencies of it.