An Investigation Of The Impact Of "Chinese Culture Aphasia" On Non-English Major Students’ Language Learning:Implication And Solution Strategies

Culture teaching in foreign language teaching (FLT) has recently received increasing attention in China. However, all these achievements were about western cultural teaching and ignored the learners’home culture. This therefore leads to students’poor performance in expressing themselves when the topics are about Chinese culture. As a result, students have poor understanding about Chinese culture and cannot express some specific Chinese cultural elements in appropriate English, which leads to the phenomenon of "Chinese Culture Aphasia" (CCA). The ignorance of native culture certainly leads to imbalance in intercultural communication (IC), and it is indeed adverse to the spread of Chinese culture in the world. Since IC is a kind of two-way communicative activity, therefore, cultural teaching should not only include teaching of the target culture but also the native culture.The research looked into Gao Yihong’s "1+1>2" theory or "Productive Bilingualism" and conducted based on mixed pragmatic research methodology-both qualitative and quantitative are involved. Culture test, questionnaires for both teachers and students, interviews and a survey are carried out in order to explore the present situation of culture teaching and learning for college students and to investigate the phenomenon of CCA. Ten teachers and 100 non-English major students from Ningxia University have participated in the research. The research aims to solve three problems:1) what is the phenomenon of CCA for non-English major students and how much Chinese culture have they "lost"? 2) What factors impact on the phenomenon of CCA? 3) What pedagogical methods can be adopted attempting to improve the integration of Chinese culture into college English teaching?The results of the study show that Chinese and western culture teaching and learning are unbalanced in College English course. The culture knowledge that students learn are mainly about western culture and few about Chinese culture. Students are very interested in learning about Chinese culture and they think that it is necessary to introduce Chinese culture to foreign friends when communicating with foreigners. But students also admit that their competence of expressing Chinese culture in English is quite weak and they know little about the English expressions of Chinese cultural elements. For the other thing, textbook compiling, curriculum design, test design, teacher’s attention and their methods all focus on western culture and ignore Chinese culture; these result in students’CCA.The research has generated a number of outcomes. Firstly, to revise the College English Curriculum Requirements (CECR), add Chinese excellent culture to College English teaching syllabus and guide students to establish correct and healthy cultural awareness are needed. Secondly, it is necessary to optimize College English textbook compilation and add contents about Chinese culture to College English textbooks. Thirdly, it is recommended that Chinese and western cultures need to be integrated into all kinds of English tests. Fourthly, College English teachers also ought to improve their Chinese cultural quality and intercultural communicative competence. Fifthly, students ought to establish correct cultural awareness and cultural identity. Sixthly, Chinese and western culture in various kinds of activities needs to be integrated in order to improve students’ICC.