A Survey on Aphasia of Chinese Culture among Non?鄄English Majors

遲騰飛

【Abstract】Chinese college students have learned English for years, but they have put too much emphasis on English language and the culture in English speaking countries and societies. Therefore, they have great difficulty in expressing their own traditional culture in English, failing in inter?鄄cultural communication. Since the foreign language education in China has almost occupied by English and its culture, linguistic imperialism and educational imperialism come into our vision. This paper makes a survey on Aphasia of Chinese Culture among Chinese college students, including the textbooks used and students performance in specific Chinese culture items. And this paper aims at getting to know its current situation and tries to find possible solutions to this problem.

【Key words】Aphasia of Chinese Culture; specific Chinese cultural items; linguistic imperialism; educational imperialism

【基金項目】本文為2012年遼寧省社會科學規劃基金項目“語用失誤與語用能力培養研究”成果，項目編號L12DYY025。

【中圖分類號】G64 【文獻標識碼】A 【文章編號】2095-3089（2014）07-0104-03 Introduction

English learning has been highlighted for a long time, which is to meet the needs of modern societys development. For decades, peoples enthusiasm towards English language learning has not descended. Instead, they just go after it more and more vigorously. College students, out of various reasons, have spent lots of time and energy learning English. They try to memorize as many words as they can to enlarge their vocabulary, listen to tapes of recordings to practice their ears, do a lot of reading and so on. It is true that foreign language learning involves some basic language skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and translating. Besides, English learners and their teachers, and even the professional educators within this field do not, fortunately, forget languages twin brother—Culture. As is well accepted and agreed, language and culture are gemini. However, what is unfortunate, English culture has been emphasized too much in both teaching and learning.

English learners have gone too far on the way of making themselves more like native speakers and teachers making them so. Materials, no matter in Chinese or in English, learnt and taught in college are mainly English?鄄culture?鄄centered. Students are required to express English things in English. Unfortunately, most college students cannot do better than the English native speakers, whereas, when foreigners would like to get more information and knowledge about Chinese culture from our students, they fail again. Because of the fact that teachers seldom teach and textbooks never involve specific Chinese cultural items, Chinese college students have great trouble in inter?鄄cultural communication, failing to talk about their own traditional culture in English. This phenomenon is commonly known as Aphasia of Chinese Culture.

Aphasia of Chinese Culture (ACC)

Aphasia, at the very beginning, comes as a medical term, which refers to the complete or partial loss of language expression and comprehension caused by physically damaged or illness?鄄influenced brain damage. In the late 20th century, some Chinese linguistics and language educators began to be aware of their peoples inability to show their own traditional culture in English, and therefore, we have the term of Aphasia of Chinese Culture (ACC), which was first used by Professor Cong in Nanjing University in 2000. Aphasia of Chinese Culture is used to describe the phenomenon that English learners in China with good English language ability, ironically, fail to fully express their motherland culture in English.

The phenomenon should have its root in English language teaching system in China. In the domestic college English teaching, ACC is usually regarded as the fact that Chinese students as English learners cannot express the Chinese culture in English, correctly and properly, leading to the great failure in inter?鄄cultural communication. Looking back at and into the text books used in English classroom settings and even the English curriculum designing, it is obvious that they are mainly focused on Western Culture with few or rare references to Chinese Culture.

Robert Phillipson (2000) in his book Linguistic Imperialism analyzes this with the term “culture imperialism”, which means “the sum of processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating center of the system” (Schiller, 1976) Methods to achieve this purpose are classified as “commercial products of all kinds, films, television serials, …advertising agencies abroad…, youth culture; the entire battery of activities in cultural diplomacy,… among them such key items as study in the Centre country, ensuring the place of the dominant language as a school subject or even as the medium of education, the stationing of inter?鄄state actors abroad, and the export of books and other reading matter; examinations ensuring inter?鄄national ‘standards, higher education links, educational ‘aid projects, etc. Many of these could be classified as educational imperialism.” (Robert Phillipson, 2000)

Chinese scholars, such as Zhang Weimin and Zhu Hongmei (2002), Liu Shiwen (2003), have done a lot of studies on ACC. They made use of different methods but came to the similar findings that most subjects in their tests or interviews are incapable of correct and proper expression of Chinese culture in English. They conducted tests on the English language ability to talk about Chinese culture topics, involving specific Chinese items, Chinese folk customs and some places of interest. And they all made the same conclusion that Chinese college students were really lack of the ability to express Chinese culture in English. Zhang Weimin (2002) found that only about 28% could describe or introduce certain traditional Chinese festivals such as the Spring Festival, the Mid?鄄autumn Day, the Dragon Boat Festival and so on. As is foreseen and proved by Li Chunxiao (2008), college students have made a better performance in talking about western festivals such as Christmas. In the study of Han Cuiping (2008), it was revealed that 70% of the subjects could not talk about Chinese culture related topics clearly and fluently. And their writings about Chinese culture tend to be full of generalities. They try to involve everything but nothing indeed.

Survey on Aphasia of Chinese Culture among Non?鄄English Majors

This paper is to conduct a survey, aiming at getting a clear and complete understanding of ACC, mainly the current situation in China among the college students. The survey is to be concerned with the textbook used for college English and the students who are learners of the textbook. This paper involves two investigations.

The purpose of the first investigation is set to find out the degree of the textbooks correlation with specific Chinese culture items. The subject in this study is the English textbook used in Shenyang Ligong University for the freshmen and sophomores who are non?鄄English majors. The books are New College English (Second Edition) Integrated Course 1-4, published by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press in 2010. These four books have totally 64 texts, including 32 A texts and 32 B texts.

The method applied in this investigation is a analytical one with statistics. Previous papers and studies tend to classify all texts into different categories. However, as of the study of their concern with specific Chinese culture items, this turns out to be simpler to do it in term of figuring out the texts concerning Chinese culture in this paper. All these 64 texts include essays and stories about society, history, culture, views of general values, language, science and technology and so on. Within so many texts, there is only one text (Text A, Unit 1, Book 2) has something to do with Chinese culture. It is entitled “Learning, Chinese?鄄Style”, written by Howard Gardner, aiming to show “the contrast some draw between a Western emphasis on discovery learning to encourage creativity and the traditional Chinese preference for a more guided approach to developing skills”. Nevertheless, the author Howard Gardner as a westerner has put more focus on the western way of learning and it could be found between lines that he has a preference to the western way.

Byram (1989) lists criteria for textbook evaluation concerning the content and manner in which a textbook includes culture. The list is shown as follows: social identity and social group (social class, regional identity, ethnic minorities); social interaction (differing levels of formality; as outsider and insider); belief and behavior (moral, religious beliefs; daily routines); social and political institutions (state institutions, health care, law and order, social security, local government); socialization and the life cycle (families, schools, employment, rites of passages); national history (historical and contemporary events seen as markers if national identity); national geography (geographic factors seen as being significant by members); stereotypes and national identity (what is “typical”, symbols of national stereotypes). On the basis of such classification and criteria, the specific Chinese culture items involved in the subject textbook New College English (Second Edition) Integrated Course are analyzed. Since the theme of Text A, Unit 1, Book 2 in New College English (Second Edition) Integrated Course is to make a contrast between the American way of education and the American peoples attitude towards raising their children and the Chinese way of doing so, this text belongs to the category of belief and behavior.

Another survey is done to see college students ability to express specific Chinese culture items in English. The 172 subjects are the sophomores who are non?鄄English majors at Shenyang Ligong University and have followed New College English (Second Edition) Integrated Course 1-4 as textbooks in class for two years. Among them, 34 are from Industrial Design, 67 are from Economics, and 71 are from Mechanical Design. The test involves 20 frequently used words and phrases to describe Chinese culture. The result is shown in Table 1.

As the statistics shows, no one of the 172 subjects know how to say “西部大開發” and “三個代表” in English. The proportions of the subjects who know the expression of “十五計劃”, “餛飩” and “剪紙” are all below 10%, and the first two are all below 2%. The subjects did better in other words and phrases, but only two of them “希望工程” and “餃子” are above 50%.

There are some typical factors concerned with understanding of Chinese culture that may lead to the subjects failure in finishing this test. For example, the subjects closest answer to “三個代表” is “three representatives”, which surely means three people. However, “三個代表” means the CPC represents three different values. Therefore, it is set as “Three Represents”, which seemingly goes against English grammar (since “represent” is a verb) but exactly goes with its true meaning. Besides, as for expressions of “剪紙” with only 8.72% accuracy and “儒學” with only 18.6% accuracy. Obviously, it is hard to imagine that one with little knowledge of how to say specific Chinese culture items in English could succeed in inter?鄄cultural communication, especially introducing Chinese culture to foreigners.

Conclusion

Surveys done in this program have revealed that the textbook writing and college English curriculum design have almost been dominated by English language and its culture. Chinese culture and the ability to express it have tended to lose its balance with English as a foreign language taught in Chinese classroom settings. This does have its own reasonable explanation, since its very purpose and target are aimed at mastering English language. Somehow, this just ignores something else that is also part of foreign language education for ESL learners.

Strategies and methods have to be conducted immediately. Otherwise, the field of Chinese culture would be soon captured or even doomed by “Linguistic Imperialism”. The English language education in China should be cautious about the unbalanced status between western culture and Chinese culture. The dominating western culture in Chinese students textbooks and education has gone too far.

First of all, it is obviously necessary to enlarge the part of Chinese culture included in language teaching in order to ensure their exposure to traditional culture and strengthen their ability in inter?鄄culture communication. The proportion of traditional Chinese culture or specific Chinese culture items involved in textbooks should get enlarged. The college English textbooks mainly include original essays and writings. However, texts concerning Chinese culture turn out to be few. As a result, most college students can say something about western festivals and, on the contrary, they have difficulty in saying about traditional Chinese festivals.

Whats more, though the change of textbook is needed, the instinct change of college English curriculum design is also in great need. The education administration should make change of the instructional objectives, make revolution of curriculum design, and set scientific and balanced training programs. As a result, this would lead the college English education in China to a correct way, and make it more suitable for modern English education in China.

Besides, more complete and further investigation should be conducted on this problem. Studies on ACC from the perspective of textbooks and college students ability to express specific Chinese culture items have been done by educators and scholars in great number. These studies turn out to be more on the technical level, that is, they mainly emphasize on specific textbooks and specific words and expression in Chinese culture, which is done in a more narrow sense of aspect. In order to get a full picture of ACC and try to solve this problem, a more generalized sense of point of view is needed. That is the cultural aspect of language and language education. According to Robert Phillipson (2000), linguistic imperialism and educational imperialism would lead to the final solution.

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