Acculturation In Senior High School Vocabulary Teaching And The Comprehension Of Word Meaning

Vocabulary constitutes an essential part of senior high Englishteaching, which often poses great challenge to teachers and students.Traditional approach demands that students memorize words andattaches importance to lexical dimension of English teaching, but failsto cultivate their learning interest and intercultural communicationcompetence. Language acquisition is a process in which studentsdevelop positive emotion, active thinking, intercultural awareness, theability to teach themselves and the skills to conduct socialcommunication.Based on the above rationale, this thesis firstly discusses thenecessity of integrating cultural knowledge in vocabulary teaching.Secondly, it takes color terms as an example, analyzes culturaldifferences in word meaning, and reveals the reasons behind so thatlearners’ reading comprehension can be effectively improved. Thirdly, itemploys empirical research to test the hypotheses. Research resultsshow that acculturation facilitates active learning and enables studentsgrasp word meaning better, including its cultural connotation, andenhances their intercultural sensitivity. Finally, this thesis proposes somepossible ways to integrate culture into vocabulary teaching with thepurpose of developing students’ language ability and interculturalcommunication competence.