A Study On The Relationship Between Intercultural Sensitivity And Acquisition Of Culturally-loaded Vocabulary

Lexical acquisition and application is significant in second language acquisition,and besides the basic core vocabulary,there are a lot of words that are loaded with abundant cultural background knowledge,and these words are usually referred to Culturally-loaded words,which account for a large proportion in English lexical acquisition.However,for a very long time,when it comes to learning words,most of the students still focus on the stage of learning the pronunciation,spelling,denotation,etc.,and they lack the respect for the culture background of the vocabulary.As a result,most of the students know very little about culturally-loaded vocabulary,let alone to use them appropriately in intercultural communications,and it would get in the way of the learners when they are trying to improve their intercultural communicative competence.As a very important part of intercultural communicative competence,the development of intercultural sensitivity is critical,and it is also a significant element of second language acquisition.The purpose of English teaching is to develop students' intercultural communicative competence,and intercultural sensitivity as an essential component that can prepare the students for making proper intercultural communications,and it can help learners to adapt,comprehend and eventually respect the differences among cultures in language learning.In recent years,even though a growing number of scholars realize that there is an inseparable relationship between intercultural sensitivity and the acquisition of culturally-loaded vocabulary,most of the studies are focused on how to improve intercultural sensitivity or how to improve the acquisition of lexicon,and there are very few studies on the connection between both.This study is based on the theories related to intercultural sensitivity and culturally-loaded vocabulary,and it focuses on the actual situation of the intercultural sensitivity and culturally-loaded vocabulary of non-English major graduate students,and the relation between the two.The subjects of this study are 150 first year non-English major's graduate students of the Northeast Forestry University.The tools for measurement are the Inventory of Cross Cultural Sensitivity,a test on culturally-loaded vocabulary and the software SPSS 24.0.All the data has been computed and analyzed by using the software.There are three questions in this study:(1).What is the real situation of the intercultural sensitivity of non-English major graduate students?(2).What is the real situation of the acquisition of culturally-loaded vocabulary of non-English major graduate students?(3).Is the acquisition of culturally-loaded vocabulary correlated with intercultural sensitivity? A conclusion is reached that the correlation between the acquisition of the culturally-loaded vocabulary and intercultural sensitivity is significantly positive,and the students who do well in the culturally-loaded test can also achieve a higher level of intercultural sensitivity.It is obvious that the correlation between the acquisition of the culturally-loaded vocabulary and the development of intercultural sensitivity is mutually beneficial.Based on this conclusion,this study analyzes both intercultural sensitivity and culturally loaded vocabulary from the perspective of the memetics theory,and then presents a few feasible suggestions for helping English teachers to improve English learners' intercultural sensitivity and the acquisition of culturally-loaded vocabulary in the classroom.This study may help teachers to understand about the real situation of non-English major graduate students' intercultural sensitivity level and their acquisition of culturally-loaded vocabulary,and both can be improved through elaborating language cultural information;keeping the students interested in studying English;training and improving students' intercultural sensitivity and their acquisition of culturally-loaded vocabulary by using their mutually beneficial factor to start a healthy English learning cycle with improving one with another.Eventually English learners' intercultural communicative competence and their second language acquisition will be both developed.