Vocabulary Teaching And Culture

Vocabulary teaching is an integral part of foreign language teaching. Its efficiency has a direct relation with the development of the learners' communicative competence. Nevertheless, vocabulary is culture-bound, it is impossible to teach vocabulary without teaching culture. However, as literature reveals, vocabulary teaching has been undervalued for a long time. During its time of being ignored, vocabulary teaching merely stopped at the level of definition, inflection, spelling, and pronunciation. For cultural aspect of the vocabulary teaching, there has been little emphasis placed on it. The ignorance of cultural factors in vocabulary teaching greatly undermines the effectiveness of foreign language teaching, and it further weakens the learners' ability to communicate appropriately in intercultural communication. Fortunately, now more and more scholars have realized the gravity of misusing the culturally loaded words and have pointed out the importance of combining culture with vocabulary teaching. Though these opinions are valuable, most of them didn't provide any guidance for how to teach culture while teaching vocabulary. In view of this, based on an in-depth explanation of the necessity of teaching culture while teaching vocabulary and an investigation of the current situation of vocabulary teaching in Chinese secondary schools and universities from the cultural perspective, this thesis tries to put forward some constructive suggestions concerning how to teach culture while teaching vocabulary so as to promote the efficiency of vocabulary teaching and enable learners to communicate successfully in intercultural communication.The thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter 1 traced the development of vocabulary teaching and the research in TEFL in order to lay a solid foundation for the model, to be proposed in Chapter 5, of how to teach culture while teaching vocabulary in Chinese foreign language classes.Chapter 2 and 3 discussed the relationship between language and culture, and the relationship between vocabulary and culture in order to provide a theoretical support for the model, to be proposed in Chapter 5, of how to teach culture in the teaching of vocabulary in Chinese foreign language classes.Chapter 4 investigated the current situation of vocabulary teaching in Chinese secondary schools and universities from the cultural perspective, in order to make our model of how to teach culture in the teaching of vocabulary in Chinese foreign language classes more reasonable and constructive. To perfect it, suggestions for the teachers in terms of knowledge, technique, and appropriate textbooks to be used in both Chinese secondary schools and universities are also collected so as to teach vocabulary effectively.Chapter 5 presents a model of systematically teaching culture in vocabulary teaching in Chinese foreign language classes, so as to improve the quality of vocabulary teaching hi our foreign language classes and further improve our learners' ability to communicate successfully in intercultural communication.