A Survey Of The Phenomenon Of Chinese Culture Aphasia In College English Teaching From The Perspective Of Intercultural Communication

With the rapid development of technology and economy, the communication and cooperation between different countries in the world are becoming more and more frequent And intercultural communication has been unprecedentedly developed. Language is not only the carrier of culture, but also a medium for spreading culture. The close relationship between language and culture determines that cultural teaching is one part of language teaching. In recent years, the teaching of western culture has been greatly attached importance to in the process of foreign language teaching (FLT), but Chinese culture is a vacancy in FLT. The bidirectional characteristic of cultural communication, which means the communication between the target culture and the native culture, is neglected in the present college English teaching. While western cultural teaching is being focused on, the absence of Chinese culture teaching results in the fact that college students learn more about western festivals, traditions and customs, understanding less about Chinese culture and having weak capacity for expressing Chinese culture in English. All these factors cause the appearance of a phenomenon of Chinese Culture Aphasia first put forward by Prof. Cong Cong (2000) in Guang Ming Daily.The early studies on Chinese Culture Aphasia was mainly focused on the problems that English majors have in their communication with foreigners, without making deep researches on this phenomenon existing in college English teaching of non-English majors. Under this circumstance, based on the theories of intercultural communication, the author conducts an empirical research. The research subjects include 187 non-English majors,29 college English teachers (including 4 foreign teachers), both of whom are from the college the author works for:College of Humanities & Sciences of Northeast University, and two sets of college English intensive reading textbooks which are presently used by most colleges and universities. By means of some empirical analysis methods such as cultural test, interview, questionnaire and text analysis, the thesis mainly discusses the following question:(1) How can non-English majors perform in mastering Chinese culture and expressing it in English? (2) What are the attitudes and expectations of college non-English majors and English teachers towards the Chinese cultural teaching in English class? (3) What is the situation like in incorporating Chinese culture into the present college English class? (4) Does Chinese Culture Aphasia exist in college English textbooks?By the detailed analysis, the following results can be found:(1) Due to the insufficient Chinese culture accumulation, the tested students lack full understanding about some Chinese cultures and they have big troubles in expressing Chinese culture in English. (2) Students and teachers don’t deny the importance and necessity of acquiring the capacity of expressing Chinese culture in English. (3) Few Chinese culture has been incorporated in college English teaching because of teaching concepts, syllabus, teaching materials and so on. (4) The phenomenon of Chinese Culture Aphasia exists in college English textbooks.According to the results of research, the thesis provides some suggestions which contain updating teaching concepts, revising syllabus, cultivating students’ cultural consciousness, improving teachers’cultural quality, adopting effective teaching methods, compiling and selecting textbooks and improving test system.