Culture Introduction To Vocabulary Teaching In Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL), has earned great attention home and abroad since 1980s. In recent years, China's uprising position on the world stage greatly enhances communications with the outside world, thus more and more foreigners are involved in Chinese language learning. As a result of this, TCFL increasingly becomes an integral means to popularize Chinese both as a language and as a culture. Among TCFL basics, vocabulary, the main carrier of meanings, as the most active element of Chinese language, imposes a lot of difficulties for foreign learners. Though decades'development of TCFL has witnessed thousands of articles published and a lot of research work carried out in Chinese vocabulary teaching and learning, most emphasis is laid on vocabulary memorization strategies but few draw an eye on cultural element which is crucial to the appropriate use of vocabulary. In light of the inseparable relationship between language and culture, scholars home and abroad claim to introduce culture to language teaching, but most focus on culture content rather on specific and explicit guidance for how to integrate culture into language teaching, not to say to integrate culture with vocabulary teaching. This thesis, from theory to practice, discusses necessity of introducing culture to vocabulary teaching in TCFL and explores feasible teaching principles and strategies with the purpose of improving Chinese vocabulary teaching efficiency.Second Language Acquisition theory and Cross-culture Communication theory are employed to lay the theoretical foundation for the thesis. Second language acquisition theory from the perspective of language teaching and learning, together with cross-culture communication theory from the perspective of real language practice, provide solid theoretical guidance as to how to teach and what to teach in TCFL vocabulary class.In this thesis, both comparative study and empirical study are employed. Referring to Geoffrey Leech'semantic classification of vocabulary, the comparative study of lexical connotations between Chinese and English vocabulary through analyzing similarities and dissimilarities aims at:(1) reinforcing the notion that words'meanings are highly culture-loaded, thus vocabulary teaching is indispensible to culture teaching; (2) identifying and predicting learners'difficulties in Chinese vocabulary learning. The empirical study puts emphasis on current situation of Chinese vocabulary teaching by a survey consisting of a test and an interview aiming at:(1) assessing current situation of Chinese vocabulary teaching; (2) identifying problems in carrying out culture teaching in TCFL. Based on the comparative study between Chinese vocabulary and English vocabulary, the test is designed with regards to learners' command of Chinese culture-loaded words. Then group interview and semi-structured interview to the tested students will be conducted to analyze the test results in the hope to find out problems in vocabulary teaching. The test and the interview disclose a series of problems in TCFL vocabulary teaching:(1) Students'command of vocabulary with connotations seems not as good as expectation; (2) Teachers'instructing culture knowledge is not sufficient enough to meet students'expectation; (3) Unitary teaching strategy can't bring efficient good learning effect.In the end, to tackle the problems identified in investigations, under the guidance of Second Language Acquisition theory and Cross-culture Communication theory, four teaching principles and five teaching strategies are creatively proposed by the author. The teaching principles include Principle of Quantity, Principle of Interest, Principle of Manner and Principle of Contrast. The teaching strategies include Culture Presentation Strategy, Laws Induction Strategy, Culture Comparison Strategy, Context Creation Strategy and Allusions Originating Strategy. Hopefully, the combination of the teaching principles and teaching strategies proposed will be of great help to the improvement of Chinese vocabulary teaching efficiency.