An Empirical Study On The Cultural Identity Of College English Learners

As the carrier of culture, the process of language acquisition is inevitably intertwined with the developing of target cultural awareness. Under the context of globalization and the domestic English learning boom, after years of English language learning experiences, college ELLs could have gradually developed some degree of identification towards western cultures. And for English language teaching, culture education often only takes the target language culture into consideration, the long absence of Chinese traditional culture education in English teaching results in the students’lack of native culture identification and Chinese cultural aphasia, which results in imbalanced intercultural communication.This paper, by investigating the cultural identification, identity anxiety and traditional cultural literary of 150 students from Tianjin Polytechnic University through questionnaire and interview, presents an empirical study on college English language learners’cultural identification. The results of the empirical study show that: the subjects in general have a higher Chinese cultural identification than that of western culture; meanwhile they also have a slight degree of cultural identity anxiety; what’s more, investigation on ELLs’ Chinese cultural literacy shows that the subjects have a lack of profound understanding towards the essence of traditional culture. Identity anxiety degree, Chinese cultural literacy and native cultural identification are correlated with each other. Students who show higher degree of Chinese cultural literacy have higher native cultural identification and lower identity anxiety.In the end the paper puts forward to integrate Chinese culture with English teaching to strengthen college ELLs’ native cultural awareness and to improve their intercultural competence and Chinese cultural identification.