Culture And Lexicons--Reflections On Pedagogical Implications

This study mainly discusses how cultural changes influence vocabulary, and explores the implication on vocabulary teaching, in order to enhance the effectiveness of vocabulary learning.The paper is divided into five chapters.The first chapter is an introduction to the objective of the paper.The second chapter mainly handles culture and lexical evolution. The impact of culture changes on vocabulary is discussed in this chapter. The development of science, the rapid changes in society, the receptive and flexible nature of English with regard to the influence of other cultures and languages - all these have resulted in a dramatic increase in vocabulary, a growth which in turn contributes to the richness and resourcefulness of the English language. This paper is primarily to examine significant events in those fields to explore how lexical changes record socio-cultural changes.The third chapter relates this impact to vocabulary teaching. It first reviews some significant vocabulary teaching theories. Some problems of previous approaches are pointed out and discussed, and then some implications on vocabulary instruction are drawn from lexical evolution.The fourth chapter presents relevant pedagogical suggestions with hope to improve vocabulary teaching.The last chapter is the conclusion of this paper.In short, it is hoped that that some contributions could be made to cultural studies and to the improvement of vocabulary teaching in foreign language teaching (FLT) through the discussion and research on the influence of cultural changes on vocabulary in this thesis.