The Establishment Of The Mode Of Cultivating Intercultural Awareness In College English Teaching

With the rapid development of modern technology and telecommunication, especially in this new century, the earth where we human beings are living seems to get smaller and smaller. It is obviously to see that, international communication and cooperation is increasingly strengthened and more and more people start to learn English as the international language for a successful intercultural communication. In universities and colleges in China, the students study English as their compulsory course to meet the needs and challenges of the 21st century. In the circle of foreign language education, the researches on intercultural communication have become a hot topic since the 1980s in China. And it has been found out that to enhance the learners'intercultural awareness (IA for short) is a good way to improve their English. More and more foreign language scholars have been devoting themselves to make studies on IA, and the theories on IA grow. However, compared with the fruitful achievements in the theoretical findings and researches, the practices of cultivating the college non-English majors'IA are far from satisfactory. Influenced by the traditional teaching methods and concepts, College English teachers overemphasize the students'linguistic competence, while neglect the importance of the cultural introduction of the target language in their teaching activities. That is to say, the cultivation of IA is still in an unsystematic state. Entitled The Establishment of the Mode of Cultivating Intercultural Awareness in College English Teaching, this paper aims to call the College English teachers'and students'attention to the importance and necessity to cultivate IA and to give a tentative teaching mode on the cultivation of IA in College English teaching. The research is done by virtue of questionnaires filled out by two groups of sophomores in Harbin University of Science and Technology. A questionnaire is carried out at the beginning of the semester, which reveals that the students'IA in the two groups is rather poor. To solve this problem, the author designs a teaching mode to help improve their IA and applies it in one group, called the experimental class. And at the end of the semester, the students'IA in the experimental class has been promoted greatly.This paper consists of six parts. The first part points out the problems existing in the current College English teaching, illustrates the research questions and gives the outline of this paper. Part 2 is about the theoretical framework supporting this study and literature review of the whole paper. Brown, H. D.'s perspective on the inseparability of language and culture, Robert Hanvey's view on intercultural awareness and Jenny Thomas's theory on Pragmatic Failure are introduced at first. And then the studies on intercultural communication at home and abroad are presented. In Part 3, the research methodology is introduced and a quantitative research is done combined with the qualitative analyses. In detail, questionnaires and empirical methods are taken to reveal the current situation of the cultivation on the intercultural awareness of college students, and to verify the feasibility of the establishment of a new teaching mode. Part 4 gives systematic and deep analyses of the statistics and shows the results about whether the intercultural awareness of college students is poor and whether their intercultural awareness is able to be cultivated and enhanced. In Part 5, the author analyzes the principles and approaches on the cultivation of college students'intercultural awareness and makes tentative suggestions by putting forward a teaching mode on cultivation of college students'intercultural awareness. Part 6 is the conclusion part. In this part, the author points out the limitation of the study and gives the recommendations for further research in this field.The research findings in this paper could be helpful to the studies on IA and foreign language education. What's more, to establish the teaching mode is the innovation point of the whole paper. The author sincerely hopes that the research could help anyone who is interested in the topic.