Reflection on vocabulary learning in second language under

across-culture contexts

Introduction

With the acceleration of globalization, people are now living

in a multi-cultural environment. The comparison and conflict

between different cultures and values gradually affect

people's personal consciousness, as well as their personal

values and cultural identity. It means that language learning

and application are not only limited to vocabulary and grammar,

understanding the culture behind the language and cultivating

cultural identity can truly learn the language well. This

article will further explain the multidimensional connection

between language, culture and identity based on the concepts

of these four elements as well as the experience of learning

a second language in a cross-cultural environment.

Section 1；The understanding about language, culture, identity

and difference

Since the 20th century, various social disciplines, including

anthropology, sociology and psychology, have been arguing

about the scientific term "culture". Bekerman(2001)believes

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that culture is one of the most complicated words in English.

He explained there are two reasons for this: firstly, the word

has undergone a complex historical evolution in several

European languages. Secondary, it has been used as an important

concept in several different disciplines. According to his

analysis, current culture is mainly used in three categories:1.

Culture describes the general process of the development of

knowledge, spirit and aesthetics, 2. Culture means a way of life

of a group during a period, or an entire human being, 3. Culture

is used to describe the practice and results of intelligence,

especially artistic activities.(Brown, 2005)

People's understanding of the nature of language also has gone

a long and complicated process. Language is a special product

in the development process of human society and also an

important medium for people to communicate. (Collins, 1994)The

language of a society is one aspect of its culture. And the

particularity of culture is shown in that it is the main tool

of learning culture, people acquire the whole culture through

the process of learning and using language.Kelly, Shadd, &

James(2003)pointed out that language expression, bearing, also

symbolizing cultural reality, both cannot be separated.Larina,

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Ozyumenko, & Kurteš (2017)argues that the use of language and

analysis is based on an analysis of the social factors, language

specific use will be affected by many factors, such as the

speaker specific social situation, social background and

identity and social meaning of language itself contains etc.

McCafferty(2002) explained that language is not static but in

continuous development. The level of language development is

measured by its richness and accuracy that does not depend on

the type of language itself, but on the level of cultural

development of the country.(McCafferty, 2002) The expressive

form of language should be restricted and influenced by the

social customs, life style, behavior style, value concept,

thinking mode, religious belief, national psychology and

character.(Noels & Clement, 1996)From the perspective of

semantics and vocabulary, words in different languages have

their specific and different cultural connotations. If people

do not understand the meaning of words, you are likely to make

mistakes in understanding and expressing them.

"Identity" refers to the question of who you think you are and

which group you belong to.(Noels & Clement, 1996). Woolfolk

(2016)argues that members of the group have the same opinions

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and feelings on cognition and evaluation due to the members of

the group share common needs, goals and interests, and they tend

to have the same cognitive tendency and value orientation with

each other and can consciously maintain such

consistency.Collins (1994) explained “identity” is the sense

of them belonging to certain culture and the group of that

culture. The different cultural background will produce

different values, world view, expression and life habits, such

as the Oriental advocate collectivism, while the west is based

on the values of individualism as the leading factor, thus cause

the different expression. Therefore, cultural identity refers

to a psychological process of recognition and approval of one's

own culture or another culture between people or between

individuals and groups. (Larina, Ozyumenko, & Kurteš,

2017)Moreover, identity plays an important role in language

learning and application. Generally, people often need to

choose appropriate cultural identity according to the

communicative context. Larina, Ozyumenko, & Kurteš

(2017)argues that people from different cultural backgrounds

seem to have different cultural identity transformation in the

same communicative context. Communication can be successful

when one is talking to another person who can identify with his

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or her identity. But when a person's identity is questioned in

a communicative context, he or she may take some time to think

about the conflict of identity. However, different languages

and cultures have different identities, values and expressions.

For example, Chinese and English belong to different language

families, which means there are various differences in

pronunciation, semantics, vocabulary, grammar, pragmatics and

characters.

Therefore, the four elements of language, culture, identity and

difference depend on and influence each other. And the mutual

penetration relationship between culture and language has

become an informal, potential curriculum in foreign language

learning. So that it is not enough for learning a foreign

language just depends on mastering the pronunciation, grammar,

vocabulary and other language knowledge. Furthermore, people

need to understand the difference between the literal meaning

and the implied meaning of the words formed by different

cultures in different languages when they learn a new language.

In fact, the successful communication requires people to

understand the cultural background of the target language

knowledge, including the understanding of how these people see

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the world by their own language, how to use language to express

ideas, and their behavior that will change in cross-cultural

communication and cultivate new identity gradually.(Yu, 2005)

Section2: the experiences about vocabulary learning in

across-culture context-

In 2017, I came to Australia for postgraduate study. After

coming to a new environment, I have found both in the in the

life, or in the multicultural classroom, because of different

values, students and teachers from different cultural

backgrounds will have different understandings of the same

article, the same sentence, the same sentence or even the same

gesture. For example, after I started to study in the university,

my first question was how to address my teacher? can I address

my teacher as ‘Teacher’ or ‘Teacher Wang’? In fact, neither

of these terms is customary in English. It is not appropriate

to call a teacher as ‘Comrade’ or ‘Comrade Zhang’, because

the word ‘Comrade’ is rarely used in the context of western

culture. However, it would be unnatural to call the teacher ‘Mr.

Wang’, ‘Mrs. Li’ or ‘Miss Pan’ for Chinese students. And

then the teacher told us that can call her name directly, I am

a little afraid of the teacher would be angry at the beginning,

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because calling one’s name directly in the Oriental culture

contexts is a very impolite thing. Generally, only the elder

or the peer can call others' names directly, so that it is

necessary to add some words showing their identity and social

status before and after the name, such as teacher zhang, driver

Chen, President Li. In China, usually, people can basically

tell the identity of a person from his/her occupation and social

status through his/her name, which is very important because

it shows respect and politeness. On the contrary, in western

society, both teachers and drivers are just the name of

profession. If a professional name is used as a title, it would

be seen as an impolite behavior.

For example, in Chinese, the word ‘deputy’ is used to indicate

position, Chinese believes that the word ‘deputy’ should be

added before the name of position. In English, several words

mean ‘deputy’. Such as vice - chairman, vice – President;

associate professor, associate director, assistant manager,

assistant secretary, deputy director, deputy devoted chief --

of staff; and undersecretary, etc. Therefore, in English,

different positions and jobs have their fixed collocation and

expressions. In addition, 'assistant' is often translated as

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'subordinates’ in Chinese, which does not show social status.

It can be seen from the above that the identity of the east and

the west is totally different in terms of career identity. Asia

is more concerned about the evaluation from others, while for

the western culture, the position and work will not receive too

much attention and comment from others. This is totally

different from what Chinese students wants to express. In fact,

the appropriate response for the ‘tourist’ can be 'I'm glad

to be of help' or' It's my pleasure', which means ‘I'm happy

(to be of service).’ The different responses to compliments

and praise are also a manifestation of the cultural conflict

between east and west. In China and other eastern countries,

people are often very ashamed to express emotion includes the

sense of praise and thanks, for example, most Asian students

at home have not seen their parents say ‘I love you’ or ‘Thank

you’ to each other or children.so that when Asian people hear

compliments from others, they try to reduce the value of things

in order to show a modest attitude. For example, when someone

tells you that the dress you are wearing is beautiful, the Asian

will say that ‘it's ok. I've been wearing it for a long time.’

Instead, western students often accept and respond to

compliments from others.

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Later, before class, I saw a Chinese student meet the teacher

at the door of the classroom, so the student politely said to

the teacher, ‘You go first.' At that timeI thought maybe he

should use 'Please', but the means of 'Please' in Chinese and

western countries is not exactly same. In some cases, 'Please'

is not used. In addition, in daily life, when you invest your

friends to dinner, you generally use ‘Help yourself’ instead

of ‘Please’. Of course, this is not absolute. It seems that

Western people gradually accept the use of ‘please’ on these

occasions, but they do not use it in their life.

Vocabulary is the most active part of language, and also the

most loaded part of culture. That's not the case, if language

learners just put the words together grammatically but don't

know anything about the cultural background, they won't

necessarily understand the sentence although they know all the

words in these sentences. For example, people from different

cultural contexts often use color words in sentences, which

maybe entirely changes the original meaning of the color words,

like ‘green with envy.’ Do people really turn green or green

when they are jealous or envious? Additionally, ‘Jack was in

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blue mood.’ In both sentences, green and blue do not refer to

colors. Both words have a different meaning, and it is not

obvious in the literal sense, under the western contexts, the

phrase ‘green with envy’ is a set phrase that means ‘very

jealous’, and the word blue is used in conjunction with mood

to show the mood of frustration.

In addition, words with the same meaning are different in

different cultural backgrounds. For example, in the English

textbooks in middle school students learn the word ‘peasant’,

but in English, the meaning of the word is not exactly the same

as that of the word ‘peasant’ in Chinese. The American

heritage dictionary defines the word ‘peasant’ as a

‘countryman, a farmer, a rustic’, ‘a person of bad breeding,

a rude person’. According to the new merriam-webster

dictionary, ‘peasant’ often referred to those who were not

education and of low social status. In Chinese, "farmer" refers

to a person directly engaged in agricultural production and

labor, there is no derogatory sense. Now secondary school

English textbooks are usually replaced peasant by ‘farmer’.

This is the problem of language and culture differences.

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Sometimes, common meaning of some words in a language contains

derogatory sense, but not in another language negative or just

expresses the neutral attitude, for example, I learned the word

‘ambitious’ in high school, in Chinese ‘ambitious’ is a

derogatory term and it is usually related with greedy and cruel

together, But, in America, people use it as a positive word,

so they say: ‘poor but ambitious’, or ‘ambitious and

hardworking.’ In many cases, the obstacles we encounter in

learning and using target language are not caused by language

knowledge but caused by cultural differences. Therefore, we

should not learn language or vocabulary in isolation, but

should combine language with culture, and we should understand

the cultural background of the language in English vocabulary

learning.

Section3: reflection on the experiences about studying second

language under different cultural context

All of the above are obvious conflicts between people from

different cultural contexts due to their different meanings of

expression and acceptance. There are mainly two kinds of errors

in communication in cross-cultural context: language error and

cultural error, and the latter is more serious. (Yu, 2005)

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However, grammatical errors may make people unhappy or affect

communication, but if the listener immediately feels aware of

the speaker's poor grammatical function, he or she is more

tolerant of his or her attitude. However, for cultural errors,

if a non-native speaker is fluent, the other side will not

attribute his or her apparent impoliteness or unfriendly

behavior to a language defect but will consider it rude or

malicious. In other words, if a person's language ability is

stronger, but lacks the corresponding standard common sense of

language application, that is, the lack of understanding of the

cultural background of the other party, by which the

cross-cultural communication activities will fail.

In China, most of the places opened the English courses started

from primary school, most Chinese students like me have learned

English for more than 10 years, however, when I came to study

abroad, when the first time I actually used English in different

cultural contexts, I found that what I learned in the textbooks

and the knowledge taught by teachers is meaningless or produce

ambiguity in a new cultural background. Then I recall more than

10 years of English learning experience, I found that when I

was still a primary school student and started to learn English,

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the teacher asked the students to recite the words and texts,

then taught the grammar knowledge, and finally guided the

students to do exercises to consolidate the knowledge. In

teaching vocabulary, however, teachers often focus on the

literal meaning of the word itself, in addition, the evaluation

of the ability of vocabulary using also only emphasizes on

requiring students to read and write the words and use simple

words make sentences. Additionally, most of the Chinese English

teachers lack the cultural knowledge and the cultural knowledge

is not enough broad, sometimes teachers believe the cultural

knowledge is not useful to improve the test scores, so that they

just focus on the grammar and vocabulary in language learning.

However, the disadvantages of this practice are obvious, for

example, I translated the phrase ‘Every dog has his day’ into

‘Every person has a happy day,’ when I began to study English.

Therefore, even after years of English learning, students have

accumulated some words and phrases, but they lack the knowledge

of the difference between the using of native language and

target language, which may lead to a series of mistakes in

vocabulary using and communication.

There is no doubt that the understanding of culture and identity

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plays an extremely important role in language learning. It can

be said without exaggeration that the understanding of cultural

contexts is directly related to the success or failure of

foreign language learning. For a long time, under the influence

of structuralist linguistics, most language teachers focus on

the language form in language teaching, mainly adopt the method

of direct translation of sentences and words and ignore the

cultivation of cross-cultural awareness. In English class, the

knowledge points related to western culture will not be

introduced in detail. It turns out that this method is not

feasible and seriously affects students' understanding and use

of the target language, which means that students do not have

profound knowledge points. Therefore, as a future English

teacher, the first step is to introduce the differences between

English and Chinese culture in daily life, as well as the

specific expressions in language form and application. Also,

it is necessary to introduce the differences in the meaning and

application of English and Chinese words and idioms caused by

cultural differences. The most important step is understanding

the Eastern and Western ways of thinking, communication

relations and cultural connotation in language expression,

which can enable language learners to use language properly and

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improve their real communication skills.

Conclusion

In conclusion, from the various cultural conflicts between the

east and the west encountered in the experiences about studying

abroad, it can be seen that the four elements of language,

culture, identity and difference are mutually influencing and

reflecting each other. Language is the foundation of the whole

culture of the society, as well as the cultural heritage can

be preserved and passed from generation to generation by

language, this means any form of language has its cultural

connotation. From the point of the relationship between

language and society, language is a social phenomenon, language

is the essential attribute as a social communication tool, at

the same time, in different cultural backgrounds, values and

identity, has given the language different meanings, and the

meaning of the relationship between language and social culture

are inseparable, this is embodied in cross-cultural vocabulary

used. Therefore, language learning, especially vocabulary

learning, needs to be combined with cultural knowledge.

Curriculum setting should improve students' cultural awareness

and cultural accomplishment, understand western values and

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ways of thinking. Moreover, teachers should not only stay on

the surface of language symbols, but also apply the method of

"cultural infiltration" into vocabulary teaching and teach

students the cultural knowledge below language symbols. Only

in this way, students would be better to master the meanings

of vocabulary if they understand the culture of the target

language.

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