您正在看的英文论文是:Cultural Background Knowledge and English Teaching。 time. Although many students have acquired four skills—listening, speaking, reading and writing according to the demand of our traditional syllabus, 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 meanings of language forms and language application in reality. We can see the following dialogues in many textbooks:

　　1. A: What’s your name?

　　B: My name is Li Hong.

　　A: How old are you?

　　B: I’m twenty.

　　A: Where do you come from?

　　B: I come from Nanjing.

　　2. A: Where are you going?

　　B: I’m going to the library.

　　3. A: Are you writing a letter to your parents?

　　B: Yes, I am.

　　A: How often do you write to your parents?

　　B: About once a week.

　　All the above dialogues are roughly the combination of Chinese thinking and English form. Although such forms are correct, they are not appropriate. Except for hospitals, immigration offices and such places, it’s unimaginable for someone to ask a string of questions like: “ What’s your name?” “ How old are you?” “ Where do you come from?” The natural reaction of English-speaking people to the greetings like: “ Where are you going?” would mostly likely be “Why do you ask?” or “It’s none of your business.” Questions like “ Are you writing to your parents?” would be though to intrude on one’s privacy. Our teaching material seldom pays attention to differences between cultures, so our students are usually ignorant of the factor of culture and they can only mechanically copy what they have learned.

　　So in language teaching, we should not only pass on knowledge of language and train learners’ competence of utilizing language, but also enhance teaching of relative cultural background knowledge.

　　In teaching of aural comprehension, we find many students complain that much time has been used in listening, but little achievement has been acquired. In order to improve competence of listening comprehension, some students specially buy tape recorders for listening and spend quite a few hours every day on it, but once they meet new materials, still, they fail to understand. What is the reason? On the one hand, maybe some students’ English is very poor and they haven’t grasped enough vocabularies, clear grammar or correct pronunciation, or maybe the material is rather difficult, etc. On the other hand, an important reason is that they are unfamiliar with cultural background of the USA and England. Aural comprehension, which is closely related to the knowledge of American and British culture, politics and economy, in fact, is an examination of one’s comprehensive competence which includes one’s English level, range of knowledge, competence of analysis and imaginative power.

　　Maybe we have this eXPerience: when we are listening to something familiar to us, no matter what is concerned, usually we are easy to understand. Even if there are some new words in the material, we are able to guess their meanings according to its context. However, when we encounter some unfamiliar material or something closely related to cultural background, we may feel rather difficult. Even if the material is easy, we only know the literal meaning, but can’t understand the connotation, because we lack knowledge of cultural background.

　　Here is a sentence from a report: “The path to November is uphill all the way.” “November” literally means “the eleventh month of year”. But here refers to “ the Presidential election to be held in November”. Another example is “red–letter days”—which is a simple phrase and is easy to hear, meaning holidays such as Christmas and other special days. But students are often unable to understand them without teacher’s eXPlanation.

　　Below are two jokes often talked about by Americans:

　　1. A: Where are you from?

　　B: I’ll ask her. (Alaska)

　　A: Why do you ask her?

　　2. A: Where are you from?

　　B: How are you. (Hawaii)

　　A may think B has given an irrelevant answer. But if A knew something about geographical knowledge of the USA, and the names of two states of the USA—Alaska and Hawaii, he would not regard “Alaska” as “I’ll ask her”, or “Hawaii” as “How are you”.

　　In v