Colors And Animals: A Study Of Cultural Connotations And Intercultural Competence

Different countries have different culture. Culture is so broad that it is embodied in every aspect of the language. Language is also a cultural carrier. Culture has close relationship with language. Vocabulary is the main parts of the language. Different cultural connotations are showed in the vocabularies of different languages. The writer chose the color terms and the animal words as the topic. The reason of choosing the two kinds of terms as the topic is not only for its important status in the vocabulary, but also for it's an interesting topic. In the thesis, the writer did a contrastive study on the differences of cultural connotations of the basic color terms and the animal words between English and Chinese. The purpose is to establish a close relationship between the cultural background knowledge and the college English teaching.The present existing problem in the college English teaching is that the linguistic knowledge is paid enough attention while the cultural knowledge is mostly ignored. Some teachers even think that cultural knowledge is unimportant or has little effect on the linguistic study. They forget the aim of teaching foreign language is to help the students cultivate the intercultural competence. That's why even the students acquire enough vocabulary and grammar points, culture shock and culture conflict still often appear when they communicate with the English native speakers. This phenomenon fully proves that the students lack enough cultural knowledge about the target language; they cannot use the language correctly though they learn enough linguistic knowledge. The thesis first compares the differences of the basic color terms and animal words between English and Chinese. Then the causes of the differences of the two cultures are found out. Based on the causes, we know culture is an important part of the language. This conclusion illustrates that culture knowledge should be paid much attention and be taught with the linguistic knowledge together.The thesis is divided into six parts.The first part is the simple introduction which mainly talks about the current situation of culture teaching in China and the significance of understanding culture differences in college English teaching.The second part is literature review. After simple introducing the relationship between culture and language, the writer lists the studies on basic color terms, animal words, intercultural competence and an overview of culture and language teaching respectively in China and abroad.The third part of the thesis firstly contrasts the differences of the cultural connotations of basic color terms between English and Chinese. Because of the limited space, the writer only contrasts black, white, red, yellow, green and blue in English with the Chinese counterparts黑,白,红,黄,绿and蓝. In the second half of this part, the cultural connotations of the animal words between English and Chinese are contrasted according to the following categories same animal words with same culture connotations, same animal words with different culture connotations, same animal words without corresponding meaning and different animal words with similar cultural connotations.In the fourth part of the thesis, the different concepts of values, different thinking modes, different geographical features and different historical backgrounds are found out as the main causes of the existing cultural differences.The fifth part is an analysis of the implication of the culture differences on college English teaching according to the test of the cultural connotations for the students of Dalian Jiaotong University. The writer also tries to put forward some teaching strategies for the purpose of fostering the students'intercultural competence.The last part is the conclusion part.