A Study Of Culture-loaded Words Knowledge And Learning Attitudes By English Majors In A Normal University

Culture-loaded words refer to those words that are tinged with specific cultural meanings. With the rapid development of the society, cross-cultural communication are not rare, in which culture-loaded words play an important role, and without knowing them may lead to misunderstanding. Culture-loaded words can also be seen as a sign of a country's culture, so in order to get to know a country's culture,culture-loaded words should be valued.Most former studies focused on the translation of culture-loaded words and the researches on students' culture-loaded words knowledge and learning attitudes were comparatively small. Furthermore, the participants chosen were mainly non-English majors instead of English majors in a normal university, most of whom will be English teachers in the future. And it's of great importance for them to grasp culture-loaded words. Therefore, in order to fill this blank and extend previous studies,it is necessary to carry out empirical studies to reveal English majors' status quo on culture-loaded words and their attitudes towards culture-loaded words learning in a normal university.The participants chosen in this study are 156 English sophomores in JiangXi Normal University. And the instruments used are the culture-loaded words test and a questionnaire. The culture-loaded test is to find out English majors' knowledge on culture-loaded words learning in a normal university and the questionnaire is designed to get a picture of English majors' attitudes towards culture-loaded words learning.After these, SPSS 19.0 and Microsoft Excel Soft are applied to analyze the results.From results of the culture-loaded words test and the questionnaire, conclusions can be drawn as follows: Firstly, English majors' status quo on English culture-loaded words in a normal university is poor. There is a large difference between the maximum score 80 and the minimum score 34. And among 156 participants, the mean score is 53.78, lower than the passing line 60, and 74.37% English majors fail in the test. Among all the eight categories in the culture-loaded words test, the last category,other words category(weather, time, etc), ranks the first, followed by politics words category, social life words category, food words category, color words category,animal words category and human body words category, and the legend and mythology words category lies at the bottom.Secondly, though English majors have an inadequate amount of knowledge on culture-loaded words, they hold a positive attitude towards culture-loaded words learning. English majors have realized the importance of learning culture-loaded words and most of them regard culture-loaded words learning as an important part of vocabulary learning.Based on the findings, some pedagogical implications are presented in this study:both English teachers and English majors should do greater amount of work in culture-loaded words teaching and learning. And the limitations of the study and some suggestions for future studies are offered at the end.