The Context Of Culture And Its Application To The Second Language Teaching

With the development of applied linguistics and functional teachingapproaches, the research of linguistics has been transferred from language theory intothe application of the language. However, the application of the language is related tothe context. Therefore, there is a great upsurge in the linguistic field recently. The studyof theory of context in the field of linguistics is to put the theory into the secondlanguage teaching and learning. In the second language teaching, the introduce andapplication of the theory can help the learners grasp the target language efficiently andprecisely and make the cross-cultural communication smoothly when the learners knowmore about the foreign culture. For the second language learners, language learning isthe goal while culture learning is the method. Learning culture is to grasp the secondlanguage more efficiently because language is the carrier of culture, and every languagehas its own cultural background. Therefore, to grasp the second language, the secondlanguage learners must know the cultural meaning of it and its culture of context.The theory of context was put forward by Bronislaw Malinowski. He thought thatlanguage and context were closely related; language cannot be understood withoutcontext. In fact, the context in his theory was just the context of situation, and hedidn't discuss the context of culture. Later, many scholars in the world studied thetheory of context from different angles, but most of them only studied the context ofsituation. The author of this thesis, however, according to the achievements of thepredecessors, divides the context into context in language and context outside oflanguage (including context of culture), and will study the theory of the context ofculture and apply it into second language teaching from three aspects- nation's mind,social culture and folk custom. From the questionnaire, we can find that 94ï¼…overseasstudents and 84ï¼…Chinese college students are very interested or interested in theculture of second language, and 100ï¼…overseas students and 84ï¼…Chinese collegestudents consider teaching of culture very important or important. That is to say, cultureteaching should be introduced into language teaching as a supplementary in order totrain them into people who can successfully undertake cross-cultural communication. The syllabus of second language teaching in recent years puts importance to cultureteaching and the students' skill of cross-cultural communication. That means we cannotadopt the traditional method of language teaching any more which devotes muchattention to the skills of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar but stress thecommunication in appropriate terms and according to the principles of communication.Therefore, students must know much about foreign culture. Meanwhile, in the syllabusof second language teaching, the skill of reading is very important, so the theory ofcontext of culture should be introduced into the teaching of reading from its 3components-nation's mind, social life and folk custom.The author of this thesis, on the basement of the achievements of the predecessors'study of the context of situation, especially puts forward the importance of the contextof culture and applies it into English/Chinese as a second language in Chinese culturethrough examples. Its theoretical basement is the importance of context of culture insecond language learning, and it is expected that the second language teachers train thestudents' skill of cross-cultural communication according to the syllabus of secondlanguage teaching. However, the teachers of the second language teaching must knowthe relationship of the method of the culture teaching and the aim of the languageteaching, and they must guide their students to have the cross-cultural awareness andawareness of the equal cultures.