A Study Of Students' Culture Schema Construction In College English Teaching And Learning

With the rapid development of science and technology, people get more and more opportunities to communicate with foreigners. However, due to the lack of cultural knowledge of the target language, many cross-cultural contacts turn out to be frustrating or even a failure.Therefore, it is of great necessity and importance to take culture into consideration in foreign language teaching. Then how to acquire cultural knowledge effectively remains a problem. In this thesis, the author attempts to solve the problem by using schema theory. Schema is a sort of background knowledge stored in a person's mind, functioning in his perceiving and understanding the world. Usually if a person is better equipped with cultural knowledge or possesses more foreign culture schemata, he or she will behave appropriately in cross-cultural communication. Therefore, the task left is how to help students build up their culture schemata about foreign languages. Based on constructivism which is a new and scientific teaching theory, the author puts forward a culture schema constructing model.The methodology used in this thesis is the combination of both qualitative and quantitative researches. The author collects the data from a test adapted from Wang Zhenya's (1991) socio-cultural test. The principal intentions of the test are: 1) to get a general idea of learner's overall knowledge of the target culture (British &American cultures). 2) to infer the learners'construction of culture schema from the results of the test. The data got from the test are put into the computer and analyzed by using descriptive statistics.Apart from a brief introduction and a conclusion, the thesis is composed of four chapters. The content of each chapter is as follows:Chapter One is literature review: a survey of researches on schema theory including the development of schema theory abroad and the domestic development of schema theory; a survey of researches on culture schema study in China; a survey of the constructivist theory of learning; a survey of English culture teaching in China.Chapter Two aims to introduce theories in this thesis, such theories include schema theory, constructivist theory of learning and theories about culture. The introduction to schema theory includes five aspects: definitions, types, modes of information processing, characteristics, and functions. The introduction of constructivism is consisted of concept of knowledge, concept of learning, concept of learners and roles played by teachers and students. And the introduction to culture involves definitions of culture, reconsidering culture study, the goals, the principles and the contents of culture teaching.Chapter Three is a survey study of students'actual culture schemata. In this part, the author tests 74 students in all and they are mainly from Shandong University, Shandong Jianzhu University and Jinan University. The subjects from these three universities are differentiated between science and arts. And generally speaking, they are chosen from different grades. The instrument used in this research is a socio-cultural test adopted from Wang Zhenya's (1991) socio-cultural test with some necessary changes.The results from the empirical study prove the low cultural competence of the students and, therefore, indicate their poor construction of culture schema which is analyzed clearly in this part. The result of the survey indicates the necessity of constructing culture schema.Chapter Four proposes the culture schema construction model and measures to carry it out. In the section of introducing the model, the author first states the teachers'role and the students'role on the basis of constructivism. Then the author proposes some specific ways to construction culture schema at curricular time and extracurricular time. The ways includes lectures on special topics, information presentation supported by technology, role-play, group discussion, cultural inquiry, reading literate books, magazines, newspapers, using authentic materials, surfing the internet, cross-cultural communication and so on.