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A Relative Study On The Intercultural Sensitivity And The Acquisition Of The Culturally Loaded Vocabulary In SLA

Posted on:2007-08-03Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:R ZhangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360242462962Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
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There are abundant words, phrases, and idioms in English loaded with cultural meaning, which are widely used in second language vocabulary learning. We call them"culturally loaded vocabulary". But for a long time, the learning of them stays at such a superficial level that the learners only pay attention to their pronunciations, spellings and the conceptual meanings. For this reason, many learners cannot understand the"culturally loaded vocabulary"very well and use them correctly. This in turn affects the improvement of the intercultural communicative competence and cannot guarantee the effective intercultural communication. Intercultural sensitivity is a significant part of intercultural communicative competence and the development and training of intercultural sensitivity is an all-important link in SLA.Although recently, more and more scholars and English teachers have realized the close connection between culture and the acquisition of vocabulary, their researches center on some very simple tests such as using comparison and contrast to teach culturally loaded vocabulary. There scarcely exist some explorations on the factors that affect the acquisition of culturally loaded vocabulary, which can combine intercultural sensitivity and SLA from the theoretical base. By using some theories of intercultural communication, the purpose of this research is to find out: 1) What is the real situation of the intercultural sensitivity and the acquisition of the cultural loaded vocabulary of the non-English majors? 2) Is intercultural sensitivity correlated with the acquisition of culturally loaded vocabulary?The subjects of this research are 150 non-English majors in Grade 2 from Jishou University. The main instrument is an inventory of intercultural sensitivity, a culturally loaded vocabulary test and SPSS11.5. All the data is put into the computer and analyzed by SPSS11.5. The whole research was conducted in three steps: first of all, Inventory of Intercultural Sensitivity by K.Cushner was used to measure the intercultural sensitivity of the subjects, which contains 31 questions with five scales. Then, a 45-minute test on culturally loaded vocabulary was administered on the subjects to see their mastery of the culturally loaded vocabulary. The test includes 50 multiple-choice problems which are carefully designed to test different categories of culturally loaded vocabulary. Most of the words and phrases are taken out from the listening materials of TOFEL & CET4 and some teaching reference books. Judith Gail Liebman, an American foreign teacher, checked up all the problems. Finally, SPSS11.5 was employed to test the validity, reliability of the questionnaire and the test; their correlation was analyzed.The result shows there remains a significant correlation between intercultural sensitivity and the acquisition of culturally loaded vocabulary. Those who have a higher intercultural sensitivity are proved to have better performance in culturally loaded vocabulary learning; among the five scales of intercultural sensitivity, empathy scale and attitudes towards others scale are most closely related to the acquisition of culturally loaded vocabulary and play a very important role in it. It is possible to improve the acquisition of culturally loaded vocabulary by heighten intercultural sensitivity.This research attempts to help college English teachers to have an understanding of the real state of intercultural sensitivity and culturally loaded vocabulary acquisition of their students, and to provide them a new way to realize the teaching goal of how to improve the vocabulary acquisition ability. This research also makes some useful suggestions on the foreign language training programs.
Keywords/Search Tags:intercultural sensitivity, culturally loaded vocabulary, SLA
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