Understanding The Cultural Idiosyncrasies As A Means Of Successfully Learning A Foreign Language

For junior middle school students who are learning English, the most outstanding problem is that most of them are not at all interested in this course. Their limited vocabulary makes things even worse. Yet it is only one of the effects caused by the lack of enthusiasm. This paper provides some suggestions to solving these problems:1. Special attention should be paid to affect in language learning;2. Vocabulary instruction is the key point;3. Cultural background knowledge can help solve the two problems.All intellectual work depends on one's interest (Piaget), and most part of teachers' work is to make students become interested in the things they are learning.We should not expect our students to communicate with others in English just like Westerners do. That is to say, what we have to do with the beginners should be that we try our best to make them interested in the language learning itself and let them get something here and now, not just tell them that it is quite helpful in the future. So we do not have to practice the communicative approaches and other such methods without doing enough research work beforehand. Instead, we recommend 'the Reading Method' and 'the Affective Approach', both of which came into being a long time ago and are once more coming into the limelight.To solve the problem of affect, this paper offers the following points of view: 1, to allay the learners' anxiety, we should try our best to make them relaxed and amused in the classroom; 2, to help the students get motivated to learn the foreign language, we should provide them with as much cultural background knowledge as possible.Language is part of culture, and one can never learn a language well if he does not have a deep understanding of its culture. For the Chinese students who are trying to learn English, it is important and necessary to get much background knowledge of the West, especially thatof Britain and the United States - their lands, their people, their history, their literature,their arts and so on.People in different countries do not live a similar life. Knowing this can help learners to understand the fact that there are so many differences between the Chinese and English languages: each nation has its own history and religion(s), and so it is natural for them to have different habits and ideas.This can help a great deal when we meet problems in learning a foreign language: there are more than one way out, and ours may not be the best one, and surely we each have our advantages and disadvantages. In this way, it is quite natural for the learner to make a comparison between the two, and develop a growing motivation to learn their culture (and their language, for particular).