The Effect Of Employing Linguistic Materials Embedded In L1 Culture On EFL Learning

The spirit and trends of globalization and localization have strongly influenced EFL teaching in our country, which makes English educators and researchers rethink the current situation of English teaching profoundly. The goal of English teaching falls on cross-cultural communicative competence:students are required to master not only English linguistically but also intensive cultural background knowledge. Meanwhile, our national identity and culture are strongly shocked due to the invasion of English, western culture and values, and neglect of learning and outputting L1 culture is not good for acquisition or communicative competence.This empirical study is designed to employ linguistic materials embedded in L1 culture in teaching in order to examine whether the application of these linguistic materials could facilitate acquisition and to what extent, to check learners'attitude toward L1 culture, and to investigate effects of making up culture aphasia and spreading Chinese culture.Based on some relative theoretical results of SLA and culture teaching, the thesis adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods.80 sophomores from Shijiazhuang Foreign Languages Institute took part in the tests, questionnaires and interviews. One class is the experimental class (EC), in which linguistic materials embedded in L1 culture is employed; the other is the controlled class (CC), and its teaching plan is continued according to schedule. The amount of input in two classes is equal. This experiment lasted for 15 weeks. The data was processed by Independent Samples T-Test and Paired Samples T-Test in software SPSS17.0. The results showed both classes have made progress, while the EC did much better, especially in reading and translation sections. At the same time, all the participants agreed that their attitudes and recognition about L1 culture changed.The results prove that the application of linguistic materials embedded in L1 culture in English teaching is feasible and has positive meanings. It could facilitate language acquisition and improve communicative competence to meet the needs of society:it could enhance the spread of Chinese culture all over the world.