Cultural Background Knowledge in English Teaching 英语毕业论文.doc

| Cultural Background Knowledge in English Teaching 1. Introduction Cultures are different from one another. Each culture is unique. Learning a foreign language well means learning more than merely mastering the pronunciation, grammar and words. It means learning also to understand how the native speakers of that language reflect the idea, customs, and behavior of their society by means of their language. Learning a language, in fact, is inseperable from learning its culture.Language is a part of culture and plays a very significant role in it. On the one hand, without language, culture would not be readable. On the other hand, language is influenced and shaped by cultures, it comprises people’s historical and cultural backgrounds as well as their approach to life and their ways of living and thinking. Language and culture interact and understanding of one requires understanding of the other. Brook stated that turning to culture, we deliberately shift focus away from language as such towards the people who use the language: where and how they live, what they think, feel, and do. It is nowadays a commonplace in a language pedagogy that language and culture are intertwined, that it is not possible to teach a language without culture, and that culture is the necessary context for language use.However, it has been given not enough care to in our teaching for a long time. Although many students have acquired four skills—listening, speaking, reading and writing according to the demand of four traditional syllabuses, they often make mistakes in application of language to real life, because our teaching and teaching materials attach importance to language forms but ignore the social meaning of language forms and language application in reality.Culture has a wide concept. It refers to the total of metal and physical civilization that created by a country and the people during the development of the social history. From the view of English teaching, it contains history,