Cultivation Of Students' Intercultural Awareness In The Teaching Of English For Careers

With the rapid development of global economy,intercultural communication between China and the world has become more and more frequent,which produces a big challenge for foreign language teaching(FLT): how to develop students' pragmatic and intercultural competence so that they can effectively interact with people from other cultures.Intercultural competence has been long drawing foreign language educators' interest.However,little attention is paid to students' intercultural awareness in English learning.This thesis analyzes students' intercultural awareness development.To study the problem,two classes of freshmen from Shanghai Civil Aviation College are chosen to join a teaching experiment.One of the classes is made as the experimental class(EC)and there are 36 students in EC.The other is the controlled class(CC)and the number of the students is 35.The research questions are:1.What is the state of the intercultural awareness development of the students at Shanghai Civil Aviation College and the current situation of their culture teaching?2.Is the application of intercultural teaching method effective in cultivating students' intercultural awareness and improving their intercultural communication competence?3.What should be done to cultivate students' intercultural awareness in FLT?Before the experiment,the students were given a pre-test on social culture to check their level of intercultural communicative competence.In the process of the experiment,for the EC,the author paid much attention to the cultural knowledge and intercultural awareness.For the CC,the author used traditional teaching method,focusing on vocabulary and grammar.After the experiment,the post-test was given to the two classes to see whether the intercultural teaching method is helpful in cultivating students' intercultural awareness.The results of the pre-test and post-test are as follows:In the pre-test,the mean score of the EC class is a bit higher than that of the CC class,which is 47.208 and 44.429.The corresponding two-tailed P value is 0.173,which is greater than 0.05,indicating that the scores of the two classes do not differ significantly.In the post-test,the mean score of the EC is significantly higher thanthat of the CC,which is 67.014 and 57.000 respectively.The corresponding P value is0.016,which is less than 0.05,indicating that there is a significant difference between the two classes.Based on the results of the test,we can reach the following conclusions.First,the current situation of culture teaching at Shanghai Civil Aviation College is not satisfactory.The students' intercultural awareness is weak.Second,the application of intercultural communicative teaching is effective in cultivating students' intercultural awareness.Third,the textbook?English for Careers helps much in cultivating students' awareness.Fourth,it is urgent and necessary for both students and teachers to take actions to pay more attention to the development of intercultural competence.