An Investigation On Students' Ability To Express Home Culture In English

Along with China's open-door policy, there has been significant increase of culture element in the English education, by way of curriculum design, text adaptation, and daily classroom practice. Culture teaching and research have seen a gradual tendency from the unilateral study of the target language culture to the bilateral study of both the target language culture and home culture. Nonetheless, the overall development of culture teaching is uneven, and target language culture greatly outweighs home culture.A review of relative theory shows the indispensable relation between language and culture, esp. the significance of culture teaching in intercultural communication. More than that, SLA research proves that the effect of language acquisition is influenced by factors such as learner factor, information input, and classroom teaching, etc. With the intercultural communication and SLA research as the theoretical framework, the investigation aims at discovering the status quo of English majors'ability to express the Chinese culture, and their perceptions towards culture teaching. What differentiates this study from others is its comparative and descriptive analysis vis-à-vis family background, grade level, and school level of 307 English majors. The study adopts both quantitative and qualitative research methods: test paper, questionnaires and interviews. The test result shows the relatively poor ability of English majors to express home culture, and significance of difference in terms of grade level and school level, i.e. juniors score higher than freshmen, students from the 2nd level college score higher than those from the 3rd level college. Family background, however, does not show much significance of difference, implying that urban/rural background does not determine the students'ability and performance; in fact, rural students score slightly higher than urban students in some categories of the test paper.Results from questionnaires and interviews show the subjects'positive attitude towards home culture, whereas test results indicate the subjects'poor ability to express home culture in English, hence the huge contrast, and the necessity of this study. Based on questionnaires and interviews, several major factors account for this phenomenon: inadequate exposure to home culture information in English class; old-fashioned teaching methods; and problematic curriculum design, etc. Some insightful suggestions such as curriculum development, information sources and testing, etc are put forward with the hope for a more balanceable culture teaching in EFL classroom.The theme of this study involves intercultural communication and the significance of home culture in the global context. Meanwhile, it provides a new angle of view for the assessment and reform of EFL teaching of English departments. It is the author's hope that policy makers and teachers balance linguistic competence and quality development, raise students'all-round quality and their cross cultural sensitivity and critical thinking.