Developing Cultural Awareness in English Writing

鄒強珍

【Abstract】Language and culture have an intimate relationship, and cultural awareness plays an important role in language learning, involving aural comprehension, speaking, reading, writing and translation. This paper mainly discusses cultural awareness in English writing.

【Key words】cultural awareness; English writing

In writing, cultural background knowledge is important. Why is it that the English writing of Chinese students looks so much like translations of Chinese? Why is it that one can easily tell whether an article was written by a Chinese or by a native speaker of English? On the one hand, it is probably because most Chinese students have not yet mastered the language. On the other hand, it is probably because of differences in Chinese and English writing styles that reflect cultural differences. So for language learners if they want to improve their writing skills, it is necessary to learn and remember a lot of language points of target language, especially the collocations that can help learners use English properly; it is necessary to know the knowledge of sentence variety that can help learners write correct English sentences; it is necessary to understand the different writing styles between Chinese and English.

1. Collocation

In order to make more exact and native sentences, students should pay much more attention to the collocations in English. Collocation is a combination of words in a language that happens very often and more frequently than would happen by chance. Different culture will have different language, so will be the collocations. For example, Chinese phrases like “接電話, 開支票, 做手術,交通擁擠” should be said like “answer the telephone, write out/make out a check, have/undergo an operation, busy/heavy traffic” in English respectively. Students can not change them according to your own mother tongue in English writing. Another thing that should be kept in mind is that in English there are a lot of polysemics. The word “conduct”, for example, may mean “direct, control, manage, stand before a band of a group of musicians and direct their playing, act as the path of the electricity and heat, etc.” However, English phrases like “conduct a meeting, conduct a campaign, conduct a study, conduct a concert” will be expressed into Chinese like “主持會議,開展活動,進行研究,指揮一場音樂會” respectively.

2. Sentence Variety

The types of English sentences are different from Chinese sentences on account of different cultural background. English sentences are divided into simple, compound, complex, or compound-complex. For foreign language learners, they may know their mother tongue very well, so it is not easy for them to use English sentences in writing proficiently. A good composition is the combination of the simple sentence and complex sentence, that is, full of sentence variety. For example: Our so-called best schools are turning out students most of whom, in any real and important sense, are as inarticulate as the most deprived children of the ghettos, as little able to speak or write simply and directly about things of importance to them, what they know, want, nd care about. The training in writing that they get, unless they are very lucky, is largely training in bull slinging and snow jobbery. Every year students at all levels write millions of papers. I once asked a very able high school senior, straight A student in English, if she ever kept any of her old English papers. She looked at me amazed. “For heavens sake”, she said, “what for?”

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3. Writing Styles

Good English writing discourages what are called “clichés” or “trite expressions”. Chinese writing, on the other hand, gives its approval to well-chosen “four-character expressions.” To a native English-speaker, the following sentence would be frowned on as an example of poor writing: he slept like a log and woke up at the crake of dawn, fresh as a daisy.

In persuasive writing such as social or political essays and editorials, English-speaking writers tend to be less militant in tone and language than most Chinese. The idea is to let the facts speak for themselves. Thus in such types of writing, one finds rather sparing use of such phrases as we must, we should not, it is wrong to, it is absurd. The tone is usually restrained; the language is generally moderate. In present-day Chinese social and political writings, facts are of primary importance, of course, but considerable stress is also laid on militancy, on making ones stand clear. This difference in attitudes is an important one.

From what had been said, it is clear that cultural awareness is necessary in language learning and writing. Teachers should help students to solve the difficulties in language as well as in culture.

References：

[1]丁往道,吳冰英語寫作手冊[M].北京:外語教學與研究出版社,2002.

[2]胡文仲.文化與交際[M].北京:外語教學與研究出版社,1994.

[3]陸國強. 英語詞匯學[M].上海:上海外語教育出版社,2002.

*本文是咸陽師范學院院級科研項目(10XSYK316)的一部分。

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