An Experimental Research On The Cultivation Of Cultural Awareness In ELT In Junior Middle School

Nowadays in teaching English as a foreign language, the importance of teaching culture has been widely recognized, but not yet in junior middle schools in China. Chinese students mostly begin to study English in junior middle schools, especially in the rural area. In traditional English teaching, language knowledge is paid too much attention to, and words, sentences and grammar are taken as the dominant factors, being separated from the culture. English teachers, especially those in junior middle schools, neglect culture teaching intentionally or unintentionally, because of lacking cultural knowledge themselves or believing there is no need and no way to teach culture in the early stage of English learning. As a result, many a middle school student has learned a considerably large number of English words by heart and they can make grammatically correct sentences, but their actual communicative competence proves to be quite disappointing. In view of the above, English teaching in junior middle schools should not be focused solely on language skills but should be aimed at developing students' communicative competence, pragmatic competence and cultural awareness.Hymes (1972:281) thinks that among the four parameters of possessing communicative competence, the essence of the fitness and appropriateness is the language users' socio-cultural ability. Many scholars, both at home and abroad, have done a lot of research on cultural teaching. But so far no systematic research has been done on present middle school English cultural teaching. This thesis probes into cultural teaching in middle schools, especially the cultivation of cultural awareness, which takes the new Junior English for China as its source material, the new English Curriculum Standards as its foundation and junior middle school students as its specific objects. In order to make clear the actual effect, the author conducted a test in Xinghai Middle School in Daxing District. The result tells us that it is necessary to incorporate cultural knowledge into English teaching in middle schools. Cultural teaching can not only arouse middle school students' interest in learning English, but also increase their cultural awareness and inter-cultural communicative ability.Therefore, this thesis points out that language should be taught with culture even at the beginning of English teaching. Teachers ought to familiarize the students with culture knowledge through different channels so as not only to enrich and improve English teaching, but also to help students to communicate with native speakers of English in a correct, proper and decent way. The cultivation of cultural awareness is as important as language proficiency. It can lead to empathy and respect toward different cultures as well as promote objectivity, cultural perspicacity and the students' personal growth.Besides, implications for the cultivation of students' cultural awareness in Junior Middle School are proposed at the end of the thesis.