An Investigation Of "Chinese Culture Aphasia" Of Non-English Majors In English Learning

With the rapid development of the globalization, English has played more and more important role in the global communication as an international language and it also has become a compulsory course in all colleges and universities in China. The main purpose of foreign language teaching in China is to develop students’cross-cultural communication competence. Few foreign language educators would disagree that the integration of cultural teaching in language teaching benefits the development of learners’ intercultural communicative competence. However, in English teaching practices, cultural teaching is mainly focused on target culture, while Chinese culture as the other side of communication is set aside. The intercultural communication is an equal and two-way exchanges of different cultures, and the loss of Chinese culture will finally result in the unbalanced intercultural communication, and it will be harmful to the transmission of Chinese culture in the world. As the intercultural communication increasing, the disadvantages of such teaching practices become obvious, causing a fact that Chinese students can not accurately express Chinese culture in English although they have been learning English for many years. The phenomenon of "Chinese Culture Aphasia" is undesirable to come into being.It was Cong Cong who first proposed the concept of "Chinese Culture Aphasia" in Guangming Daily in 2000. After that many scholars began to carry out a series of theoretical and empirical study on the topic. Until now they have achieved fruitful achievements in this field. But, there is still much to be improved. The author found that the early studies mainly focused on testing students’abilities of translating vocabularies on Chinese culture, but ignored the investigation into their holistic grasp of Chinese cultural knowledge. The contents involved in the study were not all-sided, without politics, economy, ancient thoughts, literature and etc included. Besides, most studies were designed for English majors, and the study of non-English majors’ ability to express Chinese culture in English was far from being enough. Compared with English majors, non-English majors account for a large proportion and they will turn up in all works of life in the future, so they are expected to play more important roles in intercultural communication. Through conducting a test and a questionnaire on 100 freshmen from Shaanxi Normal University involved, the study is to check non- English majors’ mastery of Chinese culture and their ability to express Chinese culture in English, and attempts to analyze plausible factors leading to "Chinese Culture Aphasia" and make feasible suggestions for current English teaching.The results revealed that the non-English-major subjects were both weaker in mastering Chinese cultural knowledge and expressing Chinese culture in English. But relatively speaking, they do better in grasping Chinese cultural knowledge than expressing Chinese culture in English. Many causes are responsible for the phenomenon of "Chinese Culture Aphasia" among non-English majors, but ambiguous guiding of teaching concept, students’ lack of enough Chinese culture input from textbooks and classroom teaching and shortage of appropriate evaluation system on culture learning are the main causes that cannot be ignored. In view of such results, the author puts forward several suggestions for further improvement of English teaching from macro and micro perspective respectively that is to promote teaching concept, to readjust and compile corresponding textbooks and reference, to perfect the evaluation system, to pay more attention to vocabularies and texts learning in class and arrange the colorful after-class activities for the purpose of meeting the needs of the development of individual, society and nation.