A Study On Intercultural Awareness Cultivation In Content-based Language Teaching

Under the background of globalization,the cooperation and communication between countries is increasingly strengthened.English language proficiency as well as intercultural competence plays an important part in intercultural communication.Intercultural competence development thus now is regarded as an integral part of foreign language teaching.However,traditional English teaching tends to focus on the development of linguistic proficiency and pays insufficient attention to the development of intercultural awareness.How to effectively cultivate foreign language learners' intercultural awareness has become an urgent problem.The content-based language teaching approach helps students achieve the goal by shifting the focus from language learning to competence development.CBLT not only helps improve students' linguistic level,but also serves to cultivate students' intercultural awareness.In this thesis,taking intercultural awareness embedded CBLT as the teaching approach,we attempt to address the following questions:1.How is the development of students' intercultural awareness?2.Is intercultural awareness embedded CBLT approach effective in cultivating students' intercultural awareness and improving their intercultural competence?3.Is intercultural awareness embedded CBLT approach effective in increasing students' linguistic knowledge and language proficiency?In this study,70 middle school students of a senior high school in Taixing City were recruited as research subjects to do the teaching experiment.The students weredivided into two classes to join the experiment that lasted for a semester.In the teaching experiment,EC adopts the intercultural awareness embedded CBLT,focusing more on the cultivation of cultural knowledge and intercultural awareness.CC adopts content-based language teaching approach,focusing more on the development of linguistic skills.We collected data through testing papers,questionnaires and interviews.Then we employed paired t-test and independent t-test,as well as correlation test to analyze the teaching results.Before the experiment,pretests were administered to test students' intercultural awareness,intercultural sensitivity and motivation to communicate in English.The research results showed that there is no significant difference between the two classes and students' competence was at the same level.To conduct the experiment,the author and the English teacher co-designed teaching content and activity on the basis of intercultural awareness embedded CBLT approach.After the experiment,posttest was administered to test whether the intercultural awareness embedded CBLT is effective to cultivate students' intercultural awareness and their intercultural competence.The teaching experiment shows that: 1.in the first stage,students' intercultural awareness and intercultural competence was relatively low.But after the experiment,their intercultural awareness and intercultural competence has increased.The cultivation of intercultural awareness is urgently needed.2.Although the content-based language teaching approach is a tentative measure,EC students' intercultural awareness is higher than CC students' intercultural awareness after theteaching experiment.That is to say,intercultural awareness embedded CBLT approach is effective in cultivating students' intercultural awareness.Meanwhile,students' intercultural sensitivity and motivation to communicate in English has been enhanced and their linguistic proficiency has been improved as well.3.With the improvement of intercultural awareness,students' linguistic proficiency has also been improved.This study has positive implications to English teaching: the cultivation of intercultural awareness is beneficial to English learning for middle school students.Students' intercultural awareness and linguistic proficiency will be improved with intercultural awareness embedded content-based language teaching approach.The development of intercultural awareness should be paid due attention to in English teaching,which includes the teaching of cultural knowledge and cultural values.