A Study On High School English Teachers’Cross-cultural Cognitive Competence

With the global economy integration, the world has been dramatically changed. Everyone worldwide is affected by fast changes and needs to communicate with the outside world to reduce and avoid international conflicts. In cross-cultural communication, a good communicator should not only focus on language skills, but also be concerned about the cultural factors. As the starting point of intercultural communication, cultural cognition plays an important role.It has been widely accepted that one of the ultimate goals of EFL teaching is to cultivate learners’cross-cultural cognitive competence. As we know, the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (MEPRC) set the requirements of cultivating high school students’ cross-cultural awareness and developing their cross-cultural communication competence in2003. Compared with the increasing number of studies on students’ cultural cognitive competence, there are fewer empirical studies on English teachers’ cultural cognitive competence, especially on high school English teachers from the aspect of teaching. The thesis attempts to explore the present state of cultural cognitive competence of English teachers in high school, and find out the underlying factors influencing the development of teachers’ cultural cognitive competence.According to Byram (1997), cultural cognitive competence includes three layers----intercultural knowledge, awareness, and behavior. The research designs to find out the answers through analyzing cultural cognitive abilities of98middle school English teachers from14middle schools in Taiyuan and Beijing. This study employs both quantitative and qualitative design. The first two parts of the questionnaire are based on the "Culture Test Model" proposed by Valette (1977), and the "Soci-cultural Test" proposed by Wang Zhenya (2005). As for cross-cultural awareness, a questionnaire on Intercultural Sensitivity Scale is adopted. The last part of the questionnaire is adapted from the test on culture teaching designed by Paloma Catro etal.(2004) and Lessard-clouston(1996). Four teachers with different cross-cultural cognitive competence were selected from the subjects for interview to get more supporting details to answer the research questions.Based on the data collected from the study, two major findings are summarized as follows:1. High school English teachers’ cross-cultural cognitive competence at high schools display an unbalanced distribution. Test results showed that they were weak in both cross-cultural knowledge and behavior.2. Although English Curriculum Standard for High School has proposed requirements of cultivating high school students’cross-cultural cognitive competence, teachers do not have enough capacity to implement them. The majority of high school English teachers tend to avoid culture teaching and pay too much attention to language teaching. Based on the above results, the thesis points out that enhancing cultural cognitive competence of English teacher at high schools is top priority.