Cultural Awareness of English Words: A Case Study of EFL Learners in China

Pu ZHAO

Abstract


Reinforcing the cultural connotation of a word plays an important role in the development of learners’ linguistic competence. Chinese EFL students are accustomed to the conceptual meaning of English words and pay little attention to the cultural connotation. Therefore, they have little understanding of cultural background knowledge of the target language. When reading a text, cultural failure at the lexical level often causes the distortion of texts. Therefore, teachers should strengthen students’ cultural awareness of English words and promote their sensitivity to culture-loaded meanings.


Keywords


Culture-loaded words; Text understanding; Cultural awareness

Full Text:

PDF

References


Qian, D. D. (1998). Depth of vocabulary knowledge in adults’ reading comprehension in English as a second language. Retrieved from http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ33914.pdf

Liu, D., ＆ Zhong, S. (1999). Acquisition of culturally loaded words in EFL. Foreign Language Annals, 32(2), 177-178.

Read, J. (1993). The development of a new measure of L2 vocabulary knowledge. Language Testing, (10), 355-371.

Wang, D. C. (2002). Pespecitves of language. Beijing: Tsinghua University Press.

Zhang, A. D., & Yang, Y. G. (2003). Cultural comparisons between English and Chinese words. Wuhan: Hubei Education Press.

Zhao, A. G., & Jiang, Y. M. (2003). A survey of applied linguistic cultural studies. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/n

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c)



Share us to:   

 

Online Submission: http://cscanada.org/index.php/sll/submission/wizard


Reminder

How to do online submission to another Journal?

If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:

1. Register yourself in Journal B as an Author

Find the journal you want to submit to in CATEGORIES, click on “VIEW JOURNAL”, “Online Submissions”, “GO TO LOGIN” and “Edit My Profile”. Check “Author” on the “Edit Profile” page, then “Save”.

2. Submission

Go to “User Home”, and click on “Author” under the name of Journal B. You may start a New Submission by clicking on “CLICK HERE”.


We only use three mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: caooc@hotmail.com; sll@cscanada.net; sll@cscanada.org

 Articles published in Studies in Literature and Language are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).

 STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE Editorial Office

Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138 
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org 
E-mail: office@cscanada.net; office@cscanada.org; caooc@hotmail.com

Copyright © 2010 Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture