Cultural Schema And College English Vocabulary Teaching

As a psychological theory, schema theory was introduced to foreign language teaching in the 1970s and since then researchers have made great efforts in its application to different fields of foreign language teaching. Schema theory has been widely used to instruct reading, listening, translating and writing teaching. However, teachers and researchers have not laid emphasis on its application to vocabulary teaching. Furthermore, cultural schema is one of the elementary parts of schema theory and it is associated with education, personal experiences, thought patterns, tradition and customs, etc. Therefore, the application of cultural schema to college vocabulary teaching will effectively enhance the integration of vocabulary teaching with culture teaching.On the other hand, vocabulary teaching is an integral part of foreign language teaching so that the efficiency of college vocabulary teaching is closely related to the development of students'communicative competence. And considering the close relationship between vocabulary and culture, it is impossible to teach vocabulary without teaching culture. However, as literature reveals, English vocabulary teaching has been undervalued for a long time. What's worse, it merely stopped at the level of spelling, pronunciation, definition and inflection. Due to the neglect of cultural aspect in vocabulary teaching, college students'cross-cultural communicative competence has been weakened. Fortunately, now more and more scholars have realized the gravity of misusing cultural-bound words and have pointed out the importance of combining culture with vocabulary teaching. Though these opinions are valuable, most of them provide little guidance for how to teach culture effectively in college vocabulary teaching.Based on a review of the history of vocabulary teaching both at home and abroad, as well as the current situation of college English vocabulary teaching in China, the author made an investigation of the current situation of cultural instruction and schema construction in college English vocabulary teaching. In view of this, this thesis tries to put forward some suggestions on how to activate students'original cultural schema and how to systematically build cultural schema while teaching college English vocabulary so as to promote the efficiency of vocabulary teaching and enable students to communicate successfully in cross-cultural communication.By introducing concepts in schema theory and based on the results of a questionnaire investigation, the thesis analyzes college English vocabulary teaching from the perspective of cultural schemata, so introducing schema theory to the field of vocabulary teaching. The paper seeks to postulate a new approach in combining culture with vocabulary teaching that is worthy of further research. Despite the author's painstaking efforts, there are still limitations in the paper. For example, the sample in the investigation is not selected randomly and its size is not big enough. Thus more and more studies are bound to follow on this fruitful area of research.