| Reinforcement in the cultural connotation of a certain word plays an important role in the development of learners' linguistic competence. It is well accepted that vocabulary is an important carrier of culture. EFL teaching should step into the cultural background knowledge to identify the cultural function of vocabulary. When introducing culture to language classroom, vocabulary is an important layer to combine language with culture. Chinese EFL students are accustomed to the conceptual meaning of English words and pay little attention to the cultural connotation of the word. Therefore, they have little understanding of cultural background knowledge of target language. Especially when reading a text, cultural failure at the lexical level often causes the distortion of text understanding. Texts with unfamiliar cultural knowledge are difficult for EFL learners to comprehend. Therefore, teachers should construct students' cultural schemata and enrich their previous knowledge, making the culture teaching as a process of creating meaning.In 1988, for the first time, in his article Cultural-loaded words and English Language Teaching, Xu analyzed culture-loaded words in three different contexts. Since then, many researches have been undertaken to explore culture-loaded words including Gao (1988; 1991), Wu (1991), Qi (1992), Liu and Zhong (1999) and M.Kupelian (2001). Based on the research findings, the researcher aims to make an exploratory investigation into strengthening the cultural awareness of English words as an effective way to improve text understanding with Chinese EFL learners.English words discussed in this paper are culture-loaded words which embody the cultural features of a language. Culture-loaded words refer to words and word equivalents with certain cultural meanings in addition to their conceptual meanings. Word equivalents include a set of phrases and idioms. The researcher mainly makes...
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