Cultivation Of Intercultural Awareness In Senior Middle School English Teaching

As is well accepted as well as excessively dissertated and practically practiced,language is an integrated component of culture and language learning is also cultural learning.The cultivation of intercultural awareness has become a part of foreign language education.More and more language teachers have come to realize its critical role in foreign or second language education.Efforts have been made to integrate culture elements into language classes.However despite the blossoming development in culture teaching in foreign language teaching in China,there seems a big discrepancy between theoretical researches and the actual practice.Both language teachers and students are not satisfied with the current culture education not only in universities but also in middle schools,especially senior middle schools,the curricula of which calls for more intercultural factors.It is obvious that cultural awareness is the pledge of using language idiomatically,expressively and appropriately.On the basis of an overview of intercultural communication studies,this paper discusses the importance of cultivation of intercultural awareness in senior middle school English teaching,carries out a sociocultural test to analyze the status quo of senior middle school students' intercultural awareness,and then puts forwards three principles of and practical measures of how to cultivate students' intercultural awareness.The reason why the author chooses senior middle school students is that culture study is a continuous whole and that culture study in high school plays a key and fundamental role in the whole culture learning process.If problems are found in this beginning stage,it will be easier and more efficient to solve them. The significance of the study is obvious.Firstly,focusing on cultivation of intercultural awareness not only has communicative ends,but also other important advantages:For example,it may encourage the awareness of others' identity as well as the development of the learners' own.Secondly,our general aim of ELT is to equip learners with knowledge,attitudes and skills for relating to whatever experience they might have in interaction with someone from another culture,thus making FLT have a responsibility to develop a critical awareness of the values and significance of cultural practices in the rival's and one's own culture.The thesis probes into the cultivation of intercultural awareness in senior middle school English teaching,which takes the English Curriculum Standard for General Senior Middle Schools as its foundation,the New Senior English for China as its source materials and senior middle school students as its specific objects.First,the researcher makes a comparatively comprehensive literature review of language,culture and intercultural teaching so as to make clear the reason why cultivating intercultural awareness is useful for language learning.What is followed is the statement of the necessity of cultivating intercultural awareness in English class,and the analysis of the difficulties that English teachers might encounter.As far as methodology is concerned,the researcher,as a senior middle school English teacher, decides to be more practical.A modified sociocultural test is carried out to investigate into the students' intercultural awareness and competence.The contents of the test are selected from those books and articles which are about culture and communication.To ensure objective and authentic findings,the researcher used secret scripts,that is,all the elements are in the form of multiple-choice questions.The questionnaire design is based on attribution theory,and aims at factors of the intercultural awareness likely to influence the investigation in middle school English teaching.The information and data statistics is processed by the Microsoft Excel software,which is,perhaps a little bit easier but somewhat less accurate,for a busy middle school teacher than the SPSS software.A thorough analysis of the results of the questionnaire is conducted on the basis of contrasting the English-speaking countries' and China's cultural differences,which becomes the basis of the thesis and hence leads to the significance of training middle school students in intercultural awareness.Three principles in the cultivating of intercultural awareness in senior middle schools are put forward in accordance with the teaching syllabus,that is,abiding by the general requirements in the Curriculum Standard,riveting attention on clearing up communicative obstacles and balancing knowledge culture and communicating culture.Then practical measures or operational suggestions in the cultivation of intercultural awareness are brought forward in macroscopic and microcosmic perspectives,to be more specific,teachers should improve teaching approaches,optimize teaching strategies,adjust the contents of courses,offer intercultural communication surroundings,provide cultural information and so on.These suggestions may not cater for every senior middle school English teaching classroom but are of use for reference to a great extent.