Cultural Transfer Among English Majors: A Case Study Of Cross Cultural Awareness

Communication is getting more and more important and essential in people's life for people from different cultures are exchanging more widely in terms of economy, science and technology and thus the world is being globalized. However more and more barriers have appeared due to the differences of various cultures.In intercultural communication and foreign language learning and use, people are often unconsciously used to applying their own cultural norms and values to guide their own behaviors and thoughts, and at the same time people use these norms and values as a criterion to judge and explain other people's behaviors and thoughts, and thus cultural transfer appears inevitably. Under such conditions, even if one has thoroughly learned the grammar of a foreign language and can speak the language fluently, he sometimes cannot correctly and properly figure out what people from different cultures really mean in speech, which may often result in communicating difficulties, misunderstandings, and even failures.According to the theory of culture structure, culture can be classified into surface-structure culture and deep-structure culture, and cultural transfer also can be divided into:surface-structure cultural transfer and deep-structure cultural transfer. The former refers to the transfer of cultural meanings of words and this transfer occurs in daily speech acts.The latter refers to the transfer of worldviews and cultural values deep in the mind and ideology. Surface-structure cultural transfer can be overcome by learning and comparing language items because it is easy to find and learn, so many scholars have already researched on and studied it. However, the deep-structure transfer is implicit and not easily perceived, and thus it has been easy to be overlooked and ignored. Therefore the findings of research in this area have been comparatively less, but the deep-structure cultural transfer is such an important issue that it may decide whether the communication is successful or not.Since the underlying values, worldviews as well as beliefs are rooted in one's mind and usually act as the working principles to guide one's thoughts and direct one's behaviors, the study of deep-structure culture and its transfer in language learning is basic and fundamental.For a long time people always pay attention to the negative cultural transfer of mother language in intercultural communication and foreign language learning, so very little research has been performed on the influence of the target language culture on mother language communication.This thesis mainly studies and analyzes the cultural awareness of English majors from a cultural transfer perspective to discuss whether English majors have culturally transferred between their mother culture and target culture when they learn the target language in their daily communication. This thesis consists of seven parts including introduction and conclusion. Chapter One is an introduction which points out the significance of studying the deep culture and its transfer by presenting and discussing the problems in intercultural communication. Chapter Two works as a literature review and theory presentation which mainly reviews the achievements and problems scholars have attained or met in cultural transfer research. The concepts of culture, the classification of culture, cultural transfer and so on are introduced as the theory base upon which this research is carried out. This part also discusses the roots and causes of different cultures by comparing the deep cultural elements of world views and values of found in Chinese and western cultures.Chapter Three mainly introduces the methodology, instruments, subjects and data collection procedure of this research. Chapter Four is the core part of this thesis;this section mainly analyzes the data of the questionnaire and discusses whether target language culture has significant influence on English majors'communication. This part also analyzes the aspects in which the students have significantly transferred between their mother culture and target culture and it at the same time addresses the issues on which their mother culture and language still keep strong influence.Chapter Five provides a conclusion to the findings of the research and proposes three suggestions for improving students' cultural awareness and cultural ability in EFL teaching in China. And at the end of this chapter, it points out what has been considered inadequate in this study and some potential areas in which further and future research can be done to more fully conduct this area of research.