A Study On Culturally-loaded Words In Senior High English Vocabulary Teaching

Language is an index to or reflection of culture and culture influences and molds language. The two are intricately interwoven, so learning a language is learning a culture. Vocabulary, as a basic unit of language and the most active and flexible member of language, carries most of culture. A large part of English words are loaded with specific cultural information, which are called culturally-loaded words. The cultural loads of these words are barriers to Chinese senior students in successful comprehension and intercommunication.Therefore, they are worthy of special attention in both English learning and teaching. On the basis of the pedagogical study of culturally-loaded words in the New Curriculum (Senior High), and a relevant review of the theoretical background as well as the requirements of cultural awareness, the author carried out a research. It poses three questions: the necessity of integrating vocabulary with culture, the correlation between linguistic proficiency and cultural knowledge, the content and strategies of implementing culturally-loaded words teaching.Both qualitative and qualitative data are collected with research instruments including two questionnaires, two vocabulary tests and an interview. All the subjects of 38 teachers and 150 students come from Huanghua Senior High School. A teaching experiment was conducted in 2 classes at Level 12 within a term. The data was collected and analyzed with the help of Microsoft Excel and Statistical Program for Social Sciences 17.0 (SPSS17.0).The author provides a detailed analysis of the problems about the incorporation of vocabulary and culture in senior high English vocabulary teaching according to the statistic data. The findings indicate that problems exist in learning and teaching culturally-loaded words in senior high English classes. Neither teachers nor students gain a proper knowledge of culture embedded in English vocabulary. They do not develop deserved cultural awareness as required in the New English Curriculum (NEC) for senior high students due to the lack of related teaching materials and teaching strategies. They also put the blame on the busy teaching schedule driven by the National Matriculation English Test (NMET). At the same time, the results of the study reveal that there exists positive correlation between the command of cultural knowledge and linguistic competence of students, which confirms the necessity of introduction of culture in language learning and teaching.The thesis finally presents some instructive suggestions in senior high classroom vocabulary teaching in terms of content and strategies, which come from the author's personal experience.In addition, most of the key words in the examples the author gives in the thesis can be found on the wordlist on NEC.