English Vocabulary Learning And Teaching From The Cross-culture Perspective

Vocabulary is the base unit to make up a language and also the carrier of the culture. Different nations have different cultures behind their languages. Learning and using English vocabulary is considered the most difficult task by Chinese learners of English across all proficiency levels. English and Chinese people have accumulated their own particular customs, historical backgrounds, religious beliefs and social systems, and so on, which accordingly form culturally loaded words in their different languages.It is believed that learners have to apply certain strategies to overcome the linguistic difficulties encountered when they communicate. Although there has been an increasing interest among researches in finding how English learners overcome linguistic problems due to an inadequate command of the target language, not much attention has been paid to English vocabulary learning and teaching from the cross-cultural perspective. Since it is known that the difficulties confronted by Chinese learners of English are mainly lexical problems in nature, it is this particular area that has attracted my attention to investigating English vocabulary learning and teaching from the cross-cultural perspective. As the research experiment is carried out in China, it is necessary to provide some general background information on the role of English vocabulary in the language and its classification and culture behind English. Since language and culture are inseparably connected, and so are English vocabulary teaching and culture teaching, as a crucial factor of English.It is expected that the results obtained in this study can shed some light on the underlying process of English lexical research and provide some helpful guidelines of English vocabulary learning and teaching for Chinese students to learn English as a foreign language.