Appreciation Of English Proverbs For Culture Teaching In China's Middle Schools: A Cross-cultural Perspective

With the globalization of social life and economy, intercultural communication has been gaining momentum. The English Curriculum Standards for High School (2003) sets the requirement of cultivating senior high school students'intercultural communicative awareness and essential intercultural communicative competence. Language is the carrier of culture. Only by understanding the cultural connotations in the target language can we master and use it properly. For a long time, in China, teachers and students focused their attention on English grammar and the like, neglecting cultural input. As a result, most students have great difficulty in using English effectively and appropriately in real intercultural communication. Nowadays, with the increasing communication between the East and the West, people have gradually come to realize that the traditional "language-oriented" method in our pedagogy is no longer effective in meeting the changing situation. Cultural factors have attracted more and more attention of both theoreticians and practitioners. This thesis attempts to analyze the feasibility of improving students'cross-cultural communicative competence through cultivating their cultural awareness by way of a comparative study of English and Chinese proverbs with a view to exploring an effective way for culture teaching. Being the quintessence of the language of a nation, proverbs reveal the nation's cultural traits. Therefore, understanding and mastering English proverbs will go a long way to the study of English language and culture. Based on the above-mentioned comparative study, this paper expounds the origins and cultural connotations of English proverbs with some typical examples. Appreciation of English proverbs can be a good way of integrating culture teaching with language teaching in China's middle schools.