An Empirical Study Of Middle School Intercultural English Course Designing,Implementing And Evaluating

Globalization facilitates communication between different countries and ethnic groups,but meanwhile,misunderstandings and conflicts owing to cultural differences come along.Thus cultivating students' intercultural competence is essential in this era.Meanwhile,it is one of the requirements in the curriculum standards of basic education in China,and serves as one important goal of foreign language teaching.Many foreign language teachers recognize the importance of intercultural teaching;however,they usually find it hard to practice.So far,several studies have provided suggestions for middle school language teachers,but there is little attention paid to developing teaching cases.Therefore,this study will focus on intercultural teaching at middle school level.The study takes a sixth-grade expanded course,Culture Exploration,in a middle school in Shanghai as the object.By designing,implementing and evaluating the course,it explores a path of intercultural teaching in middle school.The thesis first reviews related theories of intercultural competence,intercultural foreign language teaching and instructional design theories,which provide theoretical foundation for subsequent teaching design.Following the curriculum design model of Nation and Macalister(2010),the author analyses the teaching audience,then develops principles,sets teaching objectives,selects topics and contents,designs teaching activities,and proposes evaluation methods.The teaching experiment lasted for one semester with twelve 40-minute lessons in total.For evaluating the effectiveness of the teaching design,the author videotaped major teaching activities during the implementation for further analysis.Data collection in the process also includes classroom observations,student feedback questionnaires,teacher-researcher's reflection diaries,and interviews with the students' head teacher.To identify the changes of students' intercultural competence over the study period,survey questionnaires adapted from O'Neil(2008)were distributed before and after the course.As for the results,both quantitative and qualitative data show that the course successfully evokes students' curiosity and interest in learning about cultures.Meanwhile,according to students' pre-and post-test scores of the survey questionnaire,processed through SPSS 23.0 with a paired sample t test,there is a considerable improvement in students' intercultural competence.It is hoped that this study provides a useful reference for future intercultural teaching at the middle school level.