An Investigation Of English Majors' Cultural Meaning Acquisition Of Vocabulary

Vocabulary instruction is an indispensable part of foreign language teaching. Vocabulary acquisition includes the knowledge of its orthographical and phonological form, meanings, grammatical behavior, collocations, register, etc. If students only know the conceptual meaning of vocabulary items and pay little attention to their cultural meaning, they may find it hard to understand and use vocabulary correctly and appropriately. This may even cause serious misunderstanding and thus hamper the promotion of cross-cultural communicative capacities. Therefore, the cultural meaning acquisition of vocabulary is of great significance.This paper first elaborates on the necessity of instruction of the cultural meaning of vocabulary. Then, a survey study is conducted among the second-year English majors and the teachers in the Department of English Language and Literature of Capital Normal University (CNU) by means of a vocabulary test, two questionnaires, class observation as well as an interview. It aims at examining the students' cultural meaning acquisition of vocabulary and revealing the present situation of vocabulary instruction and cultural embedment in college. After that, some quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data elicited from the survey is made. In addition, correlation analysis is conducted to the results of vocabulary test and the grades of the subjects' TEM4 so as to determine the relationship between the subjects' cultural acquisition of vocabularies and their grasp of language skills. Based on the research, some conclusions are drawn as follows: (1) The second-year English majors' cultural meaning acquisition of vocabulary is rather inadequate and unsatisfactory. (2) The students' cultural meaning acquisition of vocabulary and their grasp of language skills are not significantly correlated. (3) English teachers do not fully explore the cultural elements of vocabulary in class and they teach cultural knowledge of vocabulary sporadically, rather than systematically. (4) Most of the teachers and students believe that cultural meaning acquisition of vocabulary largely depends on efforts of students after class, but at the same time the guiding role of teachers in this respect should not be ignored. Finally, some pedagogical implications are drawn and some suggestions on vocabulary instruction for English majors are given.