Culture And Teaching Of Color Terms

In foreign language teaching (FLT), vocabulary teaching and learning is very important. Vocabulary is an essential element of a language, and color terms make up a group of words included in the vocabulary. It is revealed by scientific research that our eyes are capable of distinguishing more than seven million different colors. However, not all of them have linguistic expressions available. Each nation has its color term system in the language, and differs in quantities. Statistics shows that there are only over three thousand color terms in English, and there are even fewer in Chinese. Words have different cultural connotations in different languages. The differences of cultural connotations in English and Chinese color terms provide good materials for the research in cultural differences in semantics.According to the theory of relationship between language and culture, language is a part of culture as well as a mirror of it. If we lack enough knowledge about the cultural features of the target language, we cannot use the language correctly though we learn it well, or even, we shall misunderstand in the communication, and thus "cultural blindness" is formed. Reversely, once we are familiar with the cultural commonness and difference between the source language and the target language, we can communicate freely in different contexts and therefore enter a free kingdom of a language. Among all elements of a language, vocabulary is the one which has the closest relationship with culture, because vocabulary "is the most active, most flexible, and most cultural-loaded component in a language " (Hu Wenzhong et al, 1997: 93). Recently, there is a rise of Ethnosemantics, a branch of linguistics which is aboutfinding out the ways or people in a language how to treat the dungs around through the research on the words in their language. In this thesis, the author uses the contrastive analysis to study the cultural connotations of a number of English and Chinese color terms waich she has collected from an intercultural angle.The thesis contrasts the English and Chinese color terms in three levels: 1) cultural equivalences of English and Chinese color terms; 2) cultural non-equivalences of English and Chinese color terms; and 3) cultural zero-equivalences of English and Chinese color terms. The three levels respectively indicate commonness, difference, and vacancy of meanings of English and Chinese words. At the same time, they suggest the principal reasons which cause "cultural blindness" in foreign language learning.Cultural blindness, also cultural barrier, means that people from different cultural backgrounds have contradictions and problems in their interactivities, which lead to the failure in their communication. If a learner has cultural blindness in vocabulary, he/she will get inaccurate information or even wrong information, thus affecting toe understanding of the target language, especially the deep-level understanding. In the process of vocabulary acquisition, the learner is usually content with the conceptual meanings of a word, but ignores or knows little about its cultural connotations. In Chapter Four of tbe thesis, the author takes color terms for example, and puts forward some ways to eliminate the cultural blindness in teaching vocabulary which include: 1) changing attitude and outlook; 2) using some strategies; 3) applying various activities. The author points out that with the focus shifted to the culture, when learning English, Chinese people blindly put stress on obtaining foreign customs, social traditions and life styles embedded in English vocabulary. In fact,...