Cultural Competence Cultivation In Junior Middle School English Teaching

With the development of globalization,China's entry into WTO and the coming Olympic Games in 2008, international contacts have become more and more frequent. What's more,our country has been taking effective measures to further the opening up and reform policies. Consequently, more and more cooperative and exchange programs will be held between China and foreign countries. There should be more students with intercultural competence to meet this need. It's necessary to communicate with people from different cultural backgrounds. How to make English teaching meet the needs of social and economic development has become an urgent task to English teachers. Therefore, developing students'intercultural communicative competence has been paid more attention to in English teaching. Nowadays, it has been prescribed into the New English Curriculum Standards. Obviously, Middle School English teachers are facing the challenge of exploring appropriate means of culture instruction in their teaching contents. A successful English teaching is to help language learners cultivate a good communicative ability. Barriers in English learning sometimes come from the lack of cultural knowledge. So learning a foreign language is a process of acquiring the language and its culture for communicating purpose. However, because of the testing system, teachers'academic proficiency, students'attitude and so on, culture introduction has been ignored in middle school and students'intercultural competence is poorly developed. Nowadays we also can see that after many years of English study, students still find it difficult to communicate with native English speakers. The reason is that they lack the knowledge of western culture. Since language and culture are inseparable,one cannot master the spirit of a foreign language without knowing its culture. So students of Full-time junior Middle School English not only should grasp vocabularies, grammar, and pronunciation, but also properly grasp the relationship between language teaching and interculture understanding. That means we should carry out cultural teaching in junior middle school and improve students'intercultural awareness. Culture teaching should be given priority to in English teaching. In the hope of improving interculture teaching in junior middle school English classes, practical principles and effective techniques are suggested. This thesis proceeds with the understanding of culture, talks about the importance and necessity of intercultural awareness, elaborates some language-teaching problems in the aspects of intercultural language teaching and sets forward some solutions so as to develop students'cultural sensitivity and their abilities to use various ways of communication flexibly, so as to enable students to carry out intercultural communication with English.