Application Of CALL Techniques In Culture Transmission

It has long been recognized that language is an essential and important part of a given culture and that the impact of culture upon a given language is something intrinsic and indispensable.Chinese educators have long been aware of the importance of culture in language acquisition. In the autumn of 1980, the English Language Department of Beijing Foreign Language Institute provided her students with the course "An Introduction to European Culture". Since then, the course-An Introduction to European Culture, is provided for English majors in most Chinese universities. However, the teaching results are less satisfying.Recently, advances in computer technology have motivated teachers to employ computer techniques in their daily foreign language practice. Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is gaining immense popularity in the field of TEFL /TESL, but the potential of the CALL has not been fully explored, especially in the field of culture transmission.Hence, with the help of the author's honorable tutor - Associate Professor Jin Yan, the author designed an experiment to examine whether the integration of CALL techniques, which is based on the communicative approach is helpful in the field of culture acquisition. The experiment was carried out during the 2002-2003 school year. All junior English majors (Sixty-one) of Lanzhou University of Science &Technology participated in this experiment. They were divided into two groups: experiment class and control class. A pretest and a posttest assessed long-term gains in overall cultural knowledge; and a questionnaire analyzed student perceptions of cultural learning. And then the author analyzed the results in detail. The results proved the hypothesis of the experiment. However, for the reason that the experiment was performed on a small scale, the results should be over-interoperated.This thesis is separated into four parts:Relationship between language acquisition and culture, deficits of the widely-employed culture teaching methodology, and a brief outline of the thesis are described in the first chapter.The next chapter of this thesis is dedicated to: a sketch of recent and current language teaching methodologies, a summary of culture teaching techniques employed in the European culture teaching practice and literature review of computer-assisted language learning (CALL).In the following chapter, Chapter 3, the author explains the designed experiment and makes some analyses as well.In the last chapter, the author reassesses the application of CALL techniques in general.