The Theoretical Evolution from Language Acquisition to Cultural Acquisition

Abstract

Foreign language teaching, especially second language teaching, flourished in the 20th century. Its methods and theories have evolved from general foreign language teaching to language acquisition, and then to cultural acquisition. Early teaching methods focused on the teaching of language components and structure, such as grammatical translation method, direct method and audio-visual method. From the middle and late 20th century, second language teaching gradually focused on non-linguistic factors, such as learner's emotion and motivation, learning situation, communicative behavior and many other cultural factors, such as Situational Language Teaching, Communicative Language Teaching, Community Language Learning and Suggestopedia. Explore how to create a natural environment like first language acquisition and unconscious atmosphere to enhance the effect of language acquisition. In recent decades, with the increasing cross-cultural communication worldwide, more attention has been paid to the role of cultural factors in language acquisition. For example, Krashen's Natural Approach, Schumann's Acculturation theory and the Sociocultural theory derived from Vygotsky have led language acquisition to a deeper and broader cultural field, and cultural acquisition has become a key force to promote language acquisition.