Cultivation Of Intercultural Awareness In College English Teaching

There are two important aspects in language teaching—language knowledge and culture. More and more foreign language educators in China have been conscious of the importance of intercultural awareness since the 1980s. Culture teaching is increasingly emphasized because it is conducive to the cultivation of intercultural awareness. Theoretical researches are rich in this respect whereas the practices are very poor. On the one hand, the present foreign language teaching at universities has not got rid of the influence of the traditional teaching model yet. On the other hand, teachers'intercultural awareness is not strong enough. They fail to develop their sophisticated understanding towards foreign cultures for the lack of their personal and teaching experiences, and the guidance of the related theories. In addition, some attempts have been made in a few universities in this respect, but the effect of these attempts is not so distinctive due to the failure of applying related theories to practices. College students are still deficient of necessary intercultural awareness. The purpose of the thesis is to explore how to cultivate the intercultural awareness under the direction of Milton Bennett's developmental model of intercultural awareness as an attempt to give some tentative suggestions for such cultivation.Chapter 1 introduces the background of this study, illustrates the purposes and makes an introduction of the basic framework of the dissertation.Chapter 2 is to elaborate the necessity of cultivation of intercultural awareness in college English teaching (CET) from the following perspectives. Firstly, the author will explore the intimate relationship between culture and language to interpret the inseparability of language and culture and point out that culture teaching should be carried out simultaneously with language teaching. Secondly, the author reviews the teaching of culture in foreign language teaching from the developmental stage of culture teaching, its methods and its patterns, and points out that culture teaching has the same important position as language teaching for it is conducive to cultivation of foreign language learners'IA. Thirdly, the cultural differences are contrasted between English and Chinese and between westerners and Chinese people in nonverbal communication with the conclusion that Chinese college students will encounter all kinds of intercultural misunderstandings and fail in the communication if they are lack of cultural sensitivities. Fourthly, the definition of IA proposed by Robert Hanvey and Developmental Model of Intercultural Awareness by Milton Bennett are illustrated respectively. At last, the current status of culture teaching in China is reviewed.Chapter 3 is about a deep investigation upon the current state of cultivation of intercultural awareness in CET by means of questionnaires. 200 students from two colleges, 50 Chinese English teachers and 22 foreign teachers from the previous two colleges and two universities serve as subjects of this research. Through the research, the author hopes to find out the status of intercultural awareness as well as the culture- learning attitude held by Chinese college students and the degree of confidence held by Chinese English teachers on culture teaching, and the difference of the teaching methods used by foreign teachers and Chinese English teachers in culture teaching, the suggestions on how to cultivate students'intercultural awareness, and the difficulties encountered by foreigners in CET.Chapter 4 is about the operational techniques for cultivation of students'intercultural awareness. On the basis of developmental model of intercultural awareness and according to the investigation, the author has made clear the improvements necessary for the cultivation of intercultural awareness on the part of both teachers and students, four principles - principle of systematicness, principle of level, principle of comparison, and principle of interaction, as well as a few approaches to cultivating intercultural awareness–method in vocabulary instruction, method in reading instruction, method in listening and speaking instruction, method in writing instruction, which are closely connected with culture teaching and contributive to developing college students'IA and intercultural communicative competence.Chapter 5, as a brief summary of the whole thesis, is about the significance of the study, and some limitations about the thesis and suggestions for future research dimensions.