A Case Study On Chinese Cultural Aphasia Of English-Majors

With the fast economic development of China, international communication gets more and more frequent. More and more foreigners have come to be thirsty for Chinese culture. The English-majored play a leading role in intercultural communication. It has been well-recognized that culture teaching is inevitable in language teaching and learning due to the close relationship between language and culture. However, the education of the English-majors in many universities cares more about the target language culture teaching, leaving Chinese culture far behind. Therefore, many English-majored students confront the difficulty in expressing things exclusive in Chinese culture, which is called "Chinese Cultural Aphasia", first proposed by Cong Cong in Guangming Daily in 2000. As is known, communication is a two-way activity. It would not make sense when one side can not provide information new to its counterpart. Thus, English-majors, a major group in intercultural communication, should not only know western cultures very well, but also Chinese culture so as to introduce our native culture to the world.Through a series of surveys, the author tries to prove the existence of Chinese cultural aphasia among English majors and find out the source of this problem.This thesis is composed of six chapters:Chapter One introduces the background of the research briefly:the educational development of English-majors in China, the existence of "Chinese Cultural Aphasia" among the English-majored, the necessity for the English-majored students to learn to express Chinese cultural things.Chapter Two is a detailed literature review of theories connected with this thesis: language and culture, language teaching and culture teaching, intercultural communication, the roles of foreign language teachers on cultural issues, source language cultural teaching and target language teaching and previous research on "Chinese Cultural Aphasia"Chapter Three focuses on the design of the investigation.Chapter Four presents and discusses the results of the investigation, and tries to find the reasons for such results.Based on the investigation and discussion, Chapter Five propose some suggestions for the problems.Chapter Six is the conclusion, pointing out the limitations of the thesis proposing the further research about the theme.