On The "Chinese Culture Aphasia" Of English Majors

Few foreign language educators would disagree that the integration of culture teaching in language teaching facilitates the development of learners'intercultural communicative competence. However, in foreign language teaching practices, English teaching in special, culture teaching is solely focused on target culture, while leaving host culture, referring to Chinese culture in the study aside. As the intercultural communication increasing, the defect of such practices become obvious, the phenomenon of"Chinese Culture Aphasia"as Cong Cong (2000) called emerges.The term"Chinese Culture Aphasia"raises scholars'awareness of the role of Chinese culture in foreign language teaching. Thus came out a lot of articles elaborating its importance and a series of investigations on"Chinese Culture Aphasia". A close examination of those investigations reveals that most of them aim to check learners'ability to present Chinese culture in English, ignoring their knowledge of Chinese culture. In addition, most researches are focused non-English majors; and the research on English majors'ability to express Chinese culture in English is far from adequacy.Comparing with non-English majors, English majors devote much more energy and time to English learning and are expected to play a more active role in intercultural communication, so the study on English majors'"Chinese Culture Aphasia"is of greater practical significance. Getting 150 English majors from Northwest A&F University involved, the study aims to check English majors'mastery of Chinese culture and ability to present Chinese culture in English, and attempts to find out factors leading to"Chinese Culture Aphasia"and put forward feasible suggestions for current English teaching reform.Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the test results indicates that: (1) English majors are unfamiliar with Chinese culture and significant grade difference exists on the Traditional Chinese Culture test with the freshmen having the highest mean value; (2) English majors are unqualified to present Chinese culture in English and significant grade difference exists on the English Expressiveness of Chinese Culture Proficiency Test with the junior having the highest mean value. Such non-equivalence between the decreasing mastery of Chinese culture and the increasing English linguistic proficiency, to a large extent, constraints learners'performance in presenting Chinese culture in English, which makes"Chinese Culture Aphasia"become obvious.The specific analysis on the current English teaching infers that Chinese culture has been marginalized, which can be seen from the three aspects, namely the ambiguous description of cultural teaching requirements in teaching syllabus, the absence of Chinese culture course in curriculum design and the neglecting of Chinese culture in textbooks. Based on such results, three suggestions for current English teaching adjustment and improvement are proposed, that is to set up a cultural teaching syllabus, to optimize curriculum design for English majors and to diversify cultural content of textbooks.