An Empirical Study Of Cultivating Non-English Majors’ Intercultural Awareness Through Movie Clips In EFL Teaching

With the trend of internationalization, people all around the world have more opportunities to communicate with each other. English is widely learned in China for the purpose of communication. It is found out that carrying on an effective and successful intercultural conversation with linguistic competence only is apparently not enough. Culture teaching is thus attached importance in the process of language teaching, in which culture is no longer introduced as background information. And an increasing number of English teachers devote themselves to explore the methods and approaches in enhancing learners’intercultural awareness and improving their intercultural communicative competence. Movie, with authentic situations and vividly expressed information, has long been an ideal resource used in the classroom teaching. However, the previous studies of utilizing movie clips in culture teaching are confined to the theoretical discussion about its feasibility and lesson design.Based on Baker’s (2011,2015) and Hanvey’s (1979) definitions and classifications of IA, the author carried out an empirical study by applying movie clips in the classroom teaching from the postmodernist perspective so as to answer the three research questions as follows:1. What is the status quo of the students’ intercultural awareness? 2. What is the relationship between improving students’ intercultural awareness and watching movie clips in class? 3. What are the possible problems in this movie-based class?The present study adopted introspection as the main research method combined with questionnaire. Both qualitative and quantitative data were analyzed to answer the research questions comprehensively. In detail,67 non-English majors took part in the class of culture teaching with movie clips delivered by the author. The content of their reviews and in-class discussions of the movie clips are analyzed as the qualitative data. And the two questionnaires are done by the participants before and after the course mainly to collect the quantitative data which are analyzed by SPSS 16.0.The major findings of the present study are:1.Using movie clips in the class could improve learners’I A, especially in enhancing their culture knowledge and tolerance for culture difference, as well as cultivating their critical thinking about cultures.2. It also helps learners form habits to pay attention to the cultural phenomena when watching the movie in the spare time 3. Influenced by the dualistic view of cultures and the lens of movie clips, learners tend to overgeneralize the culture traits which might further develop into culture stereotype or even bias. But it could be taken as the reference point for stepping to the full understanding of the culture through critical thinking with the guide of the teacher.The results are meaningful for teachers to deliver such course to teach culture, as well as for learners to learn culture from movies by themselves. Some suggestions are put forward for further study.