A Study On Non-English Majors' Expressiveness Of Chinese Culture In English

The spread of English over the last few decades has been remarkable, which is unparalleled in three aspects: its increasing number of users;its depth of penetration into societies and its range of functions. The above-mentioned three changes have been promoting the EFL (English as foreign language) teaching and learning in China. We won't deny the contribution of our foreign language teaching during the past decades. However, we should also admit that foreign language teaching can't properly meet the need of our society with the development of our economy and our politics, especially in the cross-cultural communication. It has been recognized gradually that when language is taught, the culture related to it also should be emphasized since language and culture are so closely connected. Great achievements have been made in theory concerning culture teaching and learning in the past twenty years. While going over those researches we are convinced that the current research over-emphasizes the target culture but neglects our home culture---Chinese culture. Will the concept result in consequence in the reality? Relatively theories and quantitative study are actually rare especially about the non-English majors.This thesis takes non-English majors as the research subjects and their expressiveness of Chinese culture in English as the research topic by employing investigation into both the non-English majors and their teachers. Based on the statistic of investigation, the author makes a conclusion that non-English majors' expressiveness of Chinese culture in English is poor and even beyond our expectation. Analyzing the reasons from the perspective of students' accumulated knowledge of Chinese culture, Chinese culture information sources in English and the current English teaching the author presents some possible and feasible suggestions.The purpose of this thesis is to point out the wrong concept of culture teaching in EFL teaching and learning that is the target-culture-oriented teaching and learning, to emphasize the cultural equality in cross-cultural communication and to contribute to the students' improvement of their expressiveness of Chinese culture in English to achieve the effective and mutual cross-cultural communication.