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What I am talking about today is "the infiltration of Chinese culture in middle school English teaching", which mainly includes three aspects: first, some basic concepts involved in the theme itself, secondly, why some Chinese culture infiltration is carried out in English teaching, and the third is the problem of how to do it. The concept of culture has a wide range of meanings, limited by time and space, and can only talk about some outlining things, hoping to attract everyone's attention. Simply put, this article can be summarized into three questions: what, why, and how.
Let's start with the first question: what is culture? The concept of culture has a wide range of meanings, including a country's history, culture, traditions, habits, customs, lifestyles, literature and art, social norms, values and other aspects. That is to say, the tangible and intangible things of a country and a nation can be divided into cultural categories. The content related to the topic we are talking about today mainly includes two aspects. First, the excellent cultural traditions that we have accumulated in China over thousands of years include some ideological things, as well as Chinese history, architecture, art, and so on. The second is the basic national conditions of our contemporary China, and many things are unique to our Country. When we compare the two languages in English and Chinese, we feel that many English words and Chinese words are one-to-one correspondence. When we come across a new word, it's natural to think of looking up the English-Chinese dictionary or the double-interpretation dictionary. For example, the Chinese "desk" is the table in English, the "desk" is the desk, and so on. After looking up the dictionary, we will say that the table in English is our "desk" in Chinese, and the desk is the "desk" in Chinese. In fact, this is not entirely the case. In addition to some proper nouns between English and Chinese languages, such as personal names, place names and scientific and technological terms, words such as laser, AIDS, etc. correspond one-to-one, other words do not correspond exactly. But these perfectly corresponding words account for only a very small part of the language, and the vast majority of the rest are not one-to-one correspondences. To take a very simple example, when I was in middle school in the 1970s, I learned to express this expression, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" "I grew up wanting to be a tractor driver," or wanting to be a worker, a farmer, etc. At that time, the "farmer" used peasant, and now we "farmers" use farmers, so why not use peasant? Because in English, the word peasant contains a pejorative meaning, containing the meaning of "uneducated, uncultured", similar to the meaning of "hillbilly" we say. In fact, farmer means differently from our farmer. Can we think that Chinese farmers can be like farmers in Britain and the United States? My niece, who is an MBA student in the UK, told me that many of her classmates are farmer's children, especially rich, and some parents fly helicopters to send their children to school. Therefore, many words between the two languages are not one-to-one correspondence.
Why aren't the vocabularies of English and Chinese corresponding to each other? First, because the word itself encompasses many cultural meanings; second, in different societies, some phenomena exist in this culture and do not exist in another. For example, our country has some words, such as "general branch of the party, party branch, member of the Communist Youth League", etc., these words belong to the category of the basic national conditions of our current society, and there is no one in English. However, these words are inevitably used when we communicate with Westerners, which requires our English learners to be able to use English to express them correctly. Therefore, Chinese culture covers two aspects, one is the excellent cultural tradition accumulated by our Country, and the other is the basic national conditions of our current society.
Let me explain why I use the word "infiltration." First of all, the so-called "infiltration" is that we want to integrate the content of Chinese culture into English teaching. That is to say, it is not a simple cultural class, and the teaching of Chinese culture should be subordinated to and serve the cultivation of students' language communication ability, and serve the improvement of our students' comprehensive English ability. In addition, the purpose of teaching is to allow students to master and use English expression methods that describe Chinese culture, that is, to learn how to express our own Things in China in English. For example, use English to introduce Confucius and Confucianism, and english to introduce Chinese literary masterpieces, such as "Dream of the Red Chamber", "Water Margin", "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", "Liaozhai Zhiyi", etc.; there are also some words in today's society, such as "harmonious society", "special economic zones" and other such expressions, which are unique to our Chinese society, so I use "infiltration" to express. The first is to serve the overall goal of English teaching, and the second is to cultivate students' communicative skills, the purpose of which is to let students learn how to use English to introduce Chinese culture.
Now let's look at the second question, which is "why." In English teaching, in the minds of many people, as long as culture is mentioned, it often refers to Western culture. This problem is widespread in our English teaching. This problem exists not only in secondary schools, but also in college English teaching. We now attach great importance to the cultivation of students' cross-cultural communication skills, but all emphasize the need to learn foreign cultures. For example, the English curriculum standards in the experiment, in the first to the ninth level, the description of the first level is to let the children know the content of Western culture such as Big Ben and the Tower of London in the United Kingdom, and rarely mention Chinese culture. Therefore, it is inevitable that we will ask, why do we do this? Why should students learn the English expression of Chinese culture? What is the point of this?
The first is the need to cultivate students' English communication ability, which is the need of the state for talents' foreign language ability, and also meets the requirements of the current "High School English Teaching Curriculum Standards (Trial)". The English curriculum standards clearly stipulate that students should be familiar with the general topics of social and cultural life, such as festivals, customs, social etiquette, etc. Asking students to be familiar with these general topics is actually asking students to be able to discuss and introduce these general topics, and you can think about whether our current students can do this. Don't say middle school students, that is, college students, English has reached the fourth and sixth levels, and it is not necessarily possible to have a good discussion on these topics. I've been concerned for years about the infiltration of Chinese culture in English teaching, starting with a discussion about teaching English at universities five or six years ago. Once, when our students from Tsinghua University and students from Malaysia exchanged views, it turned out that people spoke English very well, and although our students had passed the sixth level of English, they did not know how to say it, and they did not know how to express themselves. The student was very upset, so he wrote a letter to the academic office of our school, and the academic office of the school took this letter to our foreign language department to discuss, our English
What should I do with language teaching? When I reflected on this problem, I found that Tsinghua University students should have no problems in vocabulary, reading ability, dictation ability, etc., but the key is that they do not know how to say their own things, and when talking about their country, school, college, and class, they do not know how to express themselves in English. From this, I found a deficiency in English teaching: on the one hand, we advocate cross-cultural communication and attach importance to the study of some Western cultures; on the other hand, some things of our own culture do not know how to express, such as our festivals, customs, social etiquette, etc.
Today's society requires our students to have a strong sense of the motherland and an international vision. International vision is easier to manage, to introduce students to Western culture, understand, understand, students will naturally have this so-called international vision. But one thing, are they thinking about their own country while they are exposed to Western culture? What does this cultivation of the motherland's consciousness rely on? If we accept Western culture and leave our own culture behind, I am afraid that the sense of the motherland will be diluted. So from this point of view, it is necessary for students to learn to use English to introduce their own culture. Therefore, it is very necessary to infiltrate Chinese culture in English teaching, which is what we say from the English teaching itself. In addition, all disciplines, including English teaching, must serve the needs of our national construction and meet the needs of our country and society for talent training. The overall goal of our English teaching is not to cultivate talents for foreign countries, but to cultivate talents for our motherland to realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. That is to say, our English teaching must serve this goal. So in this new era, what is the need of our country and society for talent training? A phenomenon that deserves our attention now is the imbalance between economic power and cultural influence. We are now about to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of New China, and since the reform and opening up, in the past three decades, the economic strength of our motherland can be said to have achieved unprecedented growth in history. A survey data from last year showed that China is the third largest economy in the world, and our total economic output ranks third in the world, and it is said that this year it should be in second place. Moreover, the international financial crisis has provided a very good opportunity to enhance China's position in the world economy. People often say "ten years of Hedong, ten years of Hexi", and it is the turn of history for China to rise. The current situation is that our economic strength is constantly improving, but our cultural influence and economic strength are not matched. The increase in our cultural influence lags far behind the increase in economic influence.
In 2006, Mr. Zheng Weizhang, the former counsellor in Australia, wrote an article, the following is a short excerpt I excerpted, for everyone to read: "A teacher at a university in Melbourne told me that a student listened to his friend to do business in China, optical Chinese is not good, but also must understand Chinese culture, that is, gift-giving, so gift-giving is Chinese culture, long braids are Chinese culture, wrapping small feet is Chinese culture." "So far, many foreigners' understanding and understanding of us is still very limited, still stuck at a very low level." Braids, wrapped feet", what an age thing! We can say that some Westerners do not know as much about China as we do as a countryman. Why? Our television and media are introducing foreign things all day long, but the TV and media in the United States, britain, and other Western countries have very little to do with China, unless it is those bad negative things, they will actively report, and the good aspects are rarely involved. So they know a lot about us! Even sometimes when they see Chinese they wonder how they can dress like this? Is it Chinese, why don't you have braids, and why don't women have little feet wrapped around them? How little they know about us is really beyond our imagination. So, think about it, in this case, how to enhance the influence of our culture? To achieve a national rejuvenation, in this world, in addition to the economic strength of this nation, what is more important is the cultural influence of this nation.
To have cultural influence, we need to let the world know about our culture, so what should we do? There are only a few ways, first, let them learn Chinese, learn Chinese and then further understand our culture. Now our country has made great efforts to do this work, investing a lot of money, compiling teaching materials, establishing Confucius Institutes, and so on. Another avenue is government propaganda, but there is a point where Westerners have an instinctive resistance to government propaganda. A lot of people say the media is lying. So what really works is our ambassadors of folk culture. What is a folk culture ambassador? It is our ordinary Chinese, after arriving there, we know how to introduce our culture, and then let them gradually appreciate what Chinese culture is like, let them understand what China really looks like now, so that they can disappear
In addition to their many misconceptions about China. In this sense, the mission and task shouldered by our English teaching is quite large, and this task should run through our entire English teaching, which can be said to meet the needs of our country and society for English talents, and in fact, it is also a very important work to achieve the great cause of the rejuvenation of our entire Chinese nation.
Second, infiltrating Chinese culture in English teaching is a requirement of today's trends and situations. One trend today is that foreigners, especially those who are well educated, are becoming more and more interested in Chinese culture. Of course, as their interest grows stronger, they need someone to introduce them to them and help them understand Chinese culture. This also puts forward a new requirement for our English teaching. Another situation is that the number of international students studying in China has been increasing in recent years. Take the Department of Foreign Languages of Tsinghua University, for example, the number of foreign students we have recruited this year has exceeded the number of undergraduate students recruited in China, and the number is particularly large. And unlike before, in the early years, our international students basically came from brother countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and now there are more and more international students from those developed countries. This situation is also forcing us to put forward higher requirements and challenges for our English teaching. People are interested, so we must improve our English communication and English expression skills accordingly. However, if we don't know how to introduce our traditional Chinese things in English, and how to introduce our current situation, then this English may become a problem.
The third is the need to cultivate intercultural communication skills. Needless to say, perhaps any of our curriculum standards and syllabuses mention cross-cultural communication skills, the so-called cross-cultural communication skills, that is, to make students have this cultural awareness and be aware of the differences in this culture. One more thing, culture is never one-way. For example, the cultural issues in English teaching actually include both the culture of English-speaking countries and the culture of our Country, and the two cannot be confused. Let us not take it for granted that our teachers and students are Chinese and understand Chinese culture, but this is not necessarily the case. Nowadays, many English teachers really know very little about our traditional Chinese things, they are all superficial, half-understood, and even misunderstood, which is very troublesome. On the one hand, we teach English so that students can understand these English expression methods of traditional Chinese culture and the current situation of Chinese society. While learning and comparing, it also helps them deepen their understanding of their own traditional culture. On the other hand, we only say how the United Kingdom is and how the United States is not good, and if students really understand, I am afraid that we will have to compare the two cultures. Our ancestors often said that "there is a comparison to distinguish", and only through comparison can there be a deeper understanding. Without comparison, there is no discrimination, how can there be no comparison with Chinese culture? The comparison of the two cultures helps us to discover the focus of teaching in our teaching. That is to say, to teach students Western culture and English culture, it is also inseparable from Chinese culture, otherwise, students' understanding of Western culture will not be profound.
It is also important that only by fully mastering Chinese culture can we deeply understand Western culture and thus treat Western culture with an equal attitude. I don't know if you realize that when we talk about Chinese culture and Western culture, we are actually unequal. Some students, including some of our teachers, when talking about Western culture, the excitement, excitement, and appreciation in their eyes are overflowing with words; as for their own culture, they either do not talk about it, or they are likely to be degraded. I just saw a student in the classroom writing an article saying "Fourteen days spent in Australia", the article is very well written, the front talks about the picturesque scenery, and then when it comes to people, it is outrageous, saying that they are "perfect", what kind of people can be perfect? If our students treat Western culture and Western people with such a mentality, then do we have hope for ourselves? We must treat Western culture with an equal mindset, first, not exclusive: we must absorb the good things of the West. Second, we cannot worship the ocean and look down on ourselves, which is very important. If there is an imbalance in cultural teaching, it will certainly not be able to cultivate an equal mentality. Mr. Wang Zongyan, an old predecessor of our foreign language industry, once said that "cross-cultural communication is an exchange between two sides, rather than unilaterally learning from the other side." "So this equality mentality is very important.
Fourth, improve students' comprehensive use of English. We say that we use English for communication, and communication is nothing more than listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Now we often say that there is a phenomenon of "deaf and dumb English" in English teaching, leaving aside whether these are reasonable or not, anyway, one thing is certain: we use English to communicate must be to speak. Is speaking to express one's thoughts? We can't always talk and we can't just do it every day"hello, hi, how are you? Fine，thank you”。 Elder Xu (Xu Guozhang) said these few words when he was alive, he said, "It is not enough to speak a few dry Words of English, there are such girls, the voice is good, the tone is good, and the opening words of greeting are very similar." But after talking about the weather, there was no more talk, and I couldn't talk about serious things coherently. There is neither knowledge nor opinion, so it is not good to learn the language. We can't just talk about students, just some of our teachers, chat with foreigners, sit there, and talk about "where are you from, how long have you been in China, is it the first time you came to Baotou, where did you come to Baotou to play, whether the food in Baotou is good or not," after talking about this, what else can you talk about? Can you communicate with them in English for half an hour straight? After ten minutes, many of us are racking our brains and hollowing out our minds, what is next? Because there's nothing to say. Last year, Professor Zhang Shaojie, vice president of Northeast Normal University, used the following words when talking about our current English students: "fast mouth, pointed ears, empty thinking, and shallow knowledge." I think this should have a lot to do with our English teaching. Why? Because our student has no connotation, without connotation there is nothing to express; in addition, even if there is connotation, there is something to express, he does not know how to express it in English. So you can imagine what it would be like if our students could introduce our Chinese culture in English and express their ideas freely. If you think about us learning English, talking to foreigners, talking about the Tower of London, Washington, Christmas, April Fool's Day, and other Western things, no matter how we know, we can't talk about local people. So this requires that we have to be able to talk about our own things in English, so that we must know more than they do, and then we will have something to say.
Please think about it, in the process of communication, how does a person gain self-esteem and self-confidence? Where does our self-esteem and confidence come from? A lot of it comes from you giving the other person information that he doesn't know, and you telling the other person something he doesn't know. We learn Western things in order to understand and better understand their language and behavior; we learn Chinese culture to express ourselves and express ourselves better. We must improve students' ability to use English comprehensively and improve students' ability to identify culture, which is also inseparable from the teaching of Chinese culture. The biggest feature of our current middle school students is that their thinking is particularly active, the information channels are also very wide, and a lot of information is more than our teachers know. Therefore, they are easy to accept new things, but lack a certain ability to identify. It is easy to give our students the illusion that "everything abroad is good" without discriminating ability. So much so that we blindly accept foreign things, while our own things are a mess. Therefore, in order to improve the student's ability to identify culture, we must also let him understand Chinese culture, compare and identify, and "take its essence and discard its dross" for foreign cultures, so that our own excellent culture can be carried forward.
In addition, a good foreign language learner should also learn Chinese culture, should be interested in his own culture, and have good identification skills. Let's take a look at the results of a research report, which was done by Professor Hu Wenzhong of Beiwai and Professor Gao Yihong of Peking University, both of whom are well-known experts in English education. The study, called the "Best English Learners Survey," is what the best English learners should have. They surveyed 26 fairly good English learners, and let's take a look at the conclusion: "In the process of learning foreign languages and foreign cultures, the respondents gradually developed their outstanding ability to abandon, which not only helped their language and communication skills, but also played a better role in the improvement of their personality." Their attitude towards their mother tongue and mother tongue culture and their attitude toward foreign language and foreign culture are interactive; their treatment of mother tongue, mother tongue culture and treatment of foreign language and foreign language culture is mutually reinforcing and complementary. "Due to the time relationship, I don't have to explain too much to make people understand what it means. This survey is based on our Chinese students who have learned foreign languages well, and I think this result is convincing, that is to say, if you want to learn English well, it is still very important for the ability to abandon foreign language culture.
Next we look at the last question, which is what to do. I think what I said earlier should be convincing enough to prove that it is very necessary for us to infiltrate Chinese culture in English teaching. But some teachers should say, we have to take the exam and the college entrance examination, where is the time to teach these things? Teachers are asked to think about it, teach students some things about their own culture, let them know how to express their own culture, is it useful for the exam, even if it is the college entrance examination? Is there a role for writing, for other aspects, especially the oral examination of the college entrance examination? I think it should be useful, but how exactly do we do it?
First, it is necessary to further attract sufficient attention. So much has been said before, and that's what it means. Why further? Because now this issue has received some attention, such as the "English Tutoring Newspaper" I got last night, there is a page on it, the first article is about Yuan Longping's rice cultivation, and the last article is about arguing about the division of arts and sciences, which is very good, close to actual life. It's very good to have students write an essay that explains their point of view, involving some words from our daily lives. We should therefore pay more attention to it.
"The infiltration of Chinese culture in English teaching", why is it called "infiltration"? That is to say, it should become a long-term routine task. Another point is that in our English teaching, we not only have to learn some Western culture, we also need to add some Chinese culture. Of course, I don't mean to let everyone talk about Chinese culture at length, but to let students learn how to express Chinese culture in English. In addition, we attach importance to it, we also need to do some related research, and now our teachers participate in the competition, including the evaluation of the job is not required to write a paper, I think the issue of culture may be a good topic. Why do you say that, first of all, you should consider what should be said at the high school level in the middle school English teaching stage. Our Chinese culture should be said to be complicated and too many, and we must consider what to teach. Expressing Chinese culture can be expressed using words that can be accepted and mastered by middle school students, and after we middle school students learn these words and sentence structures, we can fully use them to express and introduce Chinese culture, rather than increasing the burden on students. Another reason for this is to increase students' closeness to English learning and reduce the sense of distance. In English teaching, many students find that learning things are far from daily life, if he learns these ready-made vocabulary can express what he sees and hears in daily life, express Chinese culture, students will feel that learning English and daily life are closely integrated. We often say that English learning should be contextualized and closely related to the real life of students, so please consider what is our biggest real life? Our students are immersed in Chinese culture and living in our current society. If they can use English to introduce Chinese culture and the world around them, is it that their sense of distance from English is reduced? This is also good for our teaching.
Let me talk about the teaching methods, there are four teaching methods in the cultural teaching: annotation, integration, comparison and experience. First of all, what is a comment? It is to encounter a cultural phenomenon to explain it, the advantage of this practice is to come quickly, and the language learning is closely combined, but relatively scattered, not systematic; the second, integration, is to combine English learning and cultural learning, for example, this article is to introduce "Kong Rong let pear" or Confucius thought, etc., but written in English, this is called integration. There is also Western culture, such as many of our articles, such as "London Eye", "London Fog", etc., while learning both language and culture; the third is comparison, we also introduced earlier, this is more common, that is, when talking about one culture, we also introduce another culture for comparison; the fourth is experience, this method we use more when introducing Western culture. For example, we let children spend a Christmas, April Fool's Day, experience it, sometimes, this experience is a virtual experience, we will make a software, the situation of buying things in the Western supermarket simulated down, let everyone experience, this is also a way to learn. So annotation, integration, comparison, experience, these four teaching methods, which one is more suitable for our English teaching? More suitable for our teaching of Chinese culture? Or how can we combine them organically? This requires us to do further research and to carry out the necessary practice in teaching.
Second, teaching materials and teaching, in the process of textbook preparation, of course, we may not be involved in the preparation of formal teaching materials, but we can write teaching and auxiliary materials. Therefore, some related content can be appropriately infiltrated in the teaching aids, such as reading comprehension. In addition, in the process of selecting reading materials for students, can we consider some articles on the comparison of Chinese and Western cultures, or write some related reading materials, so that students can learn English while understanding Chinese culture, and also know some chinese cultural expression methods. Some training activities that involve the use of English to express Chinese culture can actually penetrate into all aspects of English teaching. We have the teaching of English knowledge and the cultivation of language ability, take the teaching of English knowledge for example, for example, when teaching vocabulary, you can completely tell what a word means in English, what it means in Chinese, and which Chinese culture can be expressed. The teaching of language knowledge, listening, speaking, reading, and writing can be done perfectly. In addition, I suggest that our English can be combined with the language class? Our English teachers can look at the Chinese textbooks that students are learning at the same time, see if the things they learn can be expressed in the existing English vocabulary, and whether the content they have learned can be applied to daily life. The basic language skills that we have now in middle school students should be able to express the content of very rich Chinese culture. Why do you say this, because our curriculum standards require that the vocabulary of the college entrance examination should be about 3500 words, and such vocabulary is already very rich. Because as long as we can use 1,000 words flexibly in our daily lives, there are not many obstacles in communication. Our problem now is that students are not able to use vocabulary enough and do not know how to use words. For example, if you look at a sentence in the Analects, "Zi Yue: 'Knowing the new from the past can be a teacher.' English can be said: "The master said, a true teacher is one who keeps the past alive and is also able to understand the present. You can see that this sentence uses some simple words, and these simple words can express such a complex "warm old and new". Look at the next "Son Day: 'Threesomes, there will be my teacher.'" "'What is translation into English?'" When walking with two other people,1 will always fin d a teacher among them. "Isn't that a very simple sentence?" "Zi Ri" seems to be very difficult, but in fact, it is particularly simple to translate. Another "child day: 'Morning and death is enough.' Can be translated as "The master said,hearing the way in the morning, one could not regret dying in the evening." Translated, you will find that it is not difficult, these simple words can fully express some profound and rich Chinese cultural connotations. Of course, our teachers themselves must first know about this culture, and also find ways to improve students' interest in learning Chinese culture. For example, when reading some related articles, writing some related content, you can rest assured that you will not suffer losses in this way, and maybe one day the college entrance examination can still adopt my suggestions. If you think about it, it's not hard for us to have something about Chinese culture in our reading or writing on the exam.
In addition, can we also consider some competition activities, such as we hold a speech contest to introduce Chinese culture in English, I personally think it is very meaningful, in the process of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, in the trend of everyone paying more and more attention to Chinese culture, it is not impossible for our foreign language community to make up this hilarity.
(This article was first published in Research on Foreign Language Teaching in Basic Education, No. 1, 2010)