A Study On The Correlation Between Input And Output Of Chinese Culture In College English Teaching

Looking back of the decades of foreign language teaching history, we do not deny that we have achieved remarkable results in this field. However, the achievements mainly covers target language and target culture teaching, when viewing from the aspect of culture teaching, the Chinese English learners’ native culture is found to be ignored. Cross-cultural communication should be understood as a two-way cultural exchanging activity, thus cannot be interpreted simply as a one-way introduction of the target culture, and this two-way feature determines that culture teaching should be the teaching of both of the target and native cultures. Otherwise, it will leads to loss of learners’ native culture in communication, thus imbalance and inequality in cross-cultural communication and harm to the spreading of Chinese culture to the out world.At present, the phenomenon that the Chinese college students cannot express their native culture in English is called "Chinese culture aphasia", which is the very common problem of the Chinese college students in the process of transcultural activities. This phenomenon has aroused a great attention of many professors and scholars. Under this circumstance, this paper is purposed at making a survey of the Chinese college students’ ability to express the native culture in English and the specific role Chinese culture played in EFLT and try to analyze the correlations between the Chinese culture input and output. Briefly, our tasks are to answer the following questions:1. What is the students’ ability in expressing traditional Chinese culture in English? Or to say, what is the students’ output ability? And can be demonstrated in which aspects?2. What is the current situation of the coverage rate of traditional Chinese culture in college English books? Or to say, what is the students’input situation? And can be demonstrated in which aspects?3. Are there any correlations between the output and input of Chinese culture? If there is any, what they are?In order to answer these questions, we conducted a questionnaire survey and collected a series of statistic data, adopting both the qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis methods. The whole thesis can be subdivided into five chapters:The first chapter is the introduction of the research background, questions, purpose, significance and the mainframe.The second chapter is about the literature review, which deals with the general theoretical background and the previous researches of culture, language and culture, cultural and intercultural communication, English in China, culture content, culture learning, culture teaching in EFL, English textbook, input and output theories and introducing Chinese culture into EFL, both at home and abroad.The third chapter describes the research design including the research questionnaire, participants, data collection instruments, data collection procedures and data analysis methods.The questionnaire in this thesis is designed according the "Moran’s culture knowledge framework", consisting of four parts:cultural information or cultural products, cultural practice, cultural perspectives and self-awareness. Cultural information or cultural products belong to physical level of cultural content, including cultural social group and the cultural entity created and adopted by cultural individuals; cultural practice refers to the social intercourses between the cultural individuals of the cultural social group, including linguistic communication and non-linguistic communication and all the deeds relating to the social group and products; cultural perspectives reflects people’s knowing, belief, value and attitude, controlling people’s cultural intercourse and the creation of the cultural products; while all the cultural practices of the cultural individuals are conducted inside certain cultural social groups, which includes social environment and groups, from the national culture, language, religion in general to the social organizations and families in the specific.As the majority of English learners in colleges or universities of China are non-English majors, thus, we choose students from Petroleum Engineering and Mineral Resource Prospecting and Exploration majors from Yangtze University as our subjects for a case study. The survey adopts paper questionnaire form, by giving out the questionnaires to the students at class, with the teachers of the classroom helping to recollect the questionnaires, which shall be finished in the class without the help of any translating tools. There are totally50sheets of questionnaires being given out,50recollected, of which24are effective,26ineffective (which include the omitting of the Basic Information part and the last part in the back of the paper), with recollecting rate100%, effectiveness48%. The first three parts of the questionnaire are objective exercises (including cultural information, cultural practice and cultural perspectives), reflecting directly students’ability to express Chinese culture in English; while the last part is about self-awareness and subjectively demonstrates the students’cognition of and attitudes about Chinese culture.From the statistics we have found that the students’ability in the aspects of cultural information, cultural practice and cultural perspectives is not desirable, while their score for "self-awareness" is much higher. This indicates that, the Chinese students’acceptance rate of Chinese culture is very high but they lack the expressing ability in English, which may directly leads to failure of the transcultural communication. With that, we then make a statistical study of the coverage rate of Chinese culture in college English course book, so as to get the knowledge of the "input" situation. The author of this paper chooses the most widely used English book currently, New Horizon College English, as our target. The statistics reveal that the course book have a wide coverage of Western and American cultures, while the Chinese culture is rare, which may be one of the major reasons for the students’ lacking of the "output" ability.The fourth chapter discusses and analyzes the survey results and statistics in order to find out the correlations between the "input" and "output". The correlations may be:as the source knowledge of the students, the course book is in lack of content on Chinese culture, which leads to the lack of the input of the Chinese culture to the students, thus leads to the lack of students’ output ability.The fifth chapters, on the basis of the above study, points out the limitations of this study and give the following three suggestions for college English teaching in China:1). At this new period, teachers and students should have a new and correct perspective on the role and impact of the Chinese culture and enhance their acceptance of the Chinese culture. We should realize that English has become Esperanto or an international language, thus it should become the tool for the Chinese people to express themselves and to serve for the cause of "Chinese culture going to the outside world".2). Make adjustment of the English course book, which should intake more content of Chinese culture.3). Teachers should enhance their own qualities and organize class activities to enhance students’ transcultural awareness, so as to increase and improve their transcultural competence.