Vocabulary And Culture Teaching In Chinese Middle School English Classes

Vocabulary teaching is an integral part of foreign language teaching. Its efficiency is directly related with the success or failure of the ultimate goal of language teaching. As we all know vocabulary is a main part of language, which has natural and close relationship with culture. So it is hard to teach vocabulary completely without the teaching of culture. However this point has not been focused on in the history of vocabulary teaching. The lack of basic culture knowledge results into the misunderstanding and misuse of those culturally significant words, which contributes to the failure of cross-cultural communication. With the development of science and technology, the cooperation among countries, the culture exchange in the world, more and more experts and teachers have realized the importance of culture introduction in vocabulary teaching. Though those arguments are valuable, most of them provide little guidance towards the practice in English Language Teaching (ELT) in China. Based on an in-depth explanation of the necessity of combining culture with vocabulary teaching and investigation of the current situation of culture introduction in vocabulary teaching in ELT, this thesis aims to build a model for teaching culture while teaching vocabulary for in ELT in Chinese middle schools, in order to promote the efficiency of vocabulary teaching and cultivate the learners' cross-cultural communicative competence.The thesis is composed of four chapters.Chapter One is a historical overview that' traces back language and vocabulary teaching and research history in TEFL, in order to lay a solid foundation for our model, to be proposed in Chapter 4, about how to teach culture while teaching vocabulary in Chinese middle school English classes.Chapter Two is a series of theoretical discusses about culture, language and cross-cultured communication in order to offer support for Chapter 4 in theory.Chapter Three is an investigation of the current situation of vocabularyteaching in Chinese middle school in order to supply practical support for Chapter Four.Chapter Four presents a model of systematically introducing culture while teaching vocabulary in Chinese middle school English classes, so as to improve the quality of vocabulary teaching and further promote the learners to communicate successfully in cross- cultural communication.