Effects Of English Films On Chinese Students' Culture Learning

Culture learning has increasingly received attention from foreign language teaching (FLT) academia. Culture teaching is the process of acquiring knowledge, skills, and attitudes required for effective communication with individuals from other cultures. The recent years has seen a heated discussion on this new pedagogical subject. While authoritative foreign research has explored the effects of several culture learning strategies such as studying abroad or classroom training, the practice of learning culture from films has not received objective evaluation vis-a-vis its effectiveness.This thesis tends to measure, in an objective manner, the effectiveness of viewing English films on ESL students' culture learning. The study aims to answer two major questions:1. What culture aspects can cross-cultural viewers learn from feature films?In response to this question, the author proposed a framework categorizing film's possible cultural influence into five aspects.2. Does unguided watching of English films affect learners' cultural learning positively and effectively? ("Unguided" means the viewing activity is free of suggestion, guidance, or surveillance from a teacher, but is a total spontaneous, autonomous process.)Based on the above-mentioned framework, the author designed and carried out an experiment and quantitative data were collected to measure the effectiveness. The quantitative study collects data from 135 randomly chosen Chinese non-English majors of SISU. The instrument comprises a cultural learning test and a questionnaire. Based on the questionnaire investigating students' experience, interest and habits of watching English films, the author chose 30 subjects who had watched a lot of English movies, and other 30 who had only watched quite few, asked them to complete the same culture test and compared the results.As the research results reviewed that no distinctive difference was found in the two groups, the author further analyzed the questionnaire, concluding that the low effectiveness of film's culture influence mainly arises from three factors as follows: students' lack of appreciation of film's instructive value; difficulty in comprehension; lack of cultural learning awareness. In the last chapter, the author further gave some advise on ways of raising the effectiveness of films' culture teaching function.