Text-Based Intercultural Teaching Design In Junior High School And Study Of Its Effectiveness

As an important method of foreign language teaching,intercultural teaching has been widely used in the process of foreign language teaching.Different from traditional teaching methods,intercultural teaching pays more attention to the infiltration of cultural knowledge and cultural content in the process of foreign language teaching,not just focusing on the learning of the foreign language itself.This paper takes the intercultural teaching model proposed by Byram as the theoretical basis,and aims to investigate the application and effectiveness of intercultural teaching design in junior high school English teaching to answer the two questions: 1)What is the framework of goals,contents and methods for the textbook based intercultural teaching design in junior high school? 2)Can this intercultural teaching design based on the analytical framework of goals,content and methods improve students' intercultural communication competence?For the first question,it is through the analysis of teaching materials and curriculum standards in compulsory education stage and the characteristics of middle school students to design the basic goals,contents and methods of intercultural teaching.This study translated the curriculum standards that are related to intercultural teaching into four aspects of intercultural communication competence: attitude,knowledge,skills and cultural awareness as the target reference of intercultural foreign language teaching design;The four types of culture derived from the analysis of teaching materials: local culture,target language culture,other culture and comparative culture are the basic models of culture teaching.Case comparative method,role-play and multimedia method are the main teaching methods.Based on these,one unit is selected as the example to explain the teaching design.For the second question,the author will take 80 students from Bo Hai Middle School as the object of investigation.Among the 80 students,40 students come from Controlled Class while the others come from Experimental Class.During the experiment,intercultural teaching will be done in experimental class and control class will use ordinary teaching.Chen's intercultural sensitivity scale(intercultural communication competence)is used for pre-test and post-test and the results of students‘ intercultural communication competence are analyzed by SPSS.16 to determine the effectiveness of the design.The major findings are the followings: through the data analysis before and after the experiment,students' intercultural communication competence have been clearly improved after the experiment.The scores of the experimental class are significantly higher than those of the control class,and their intercultural communication competence are in the middle or higher level,which prove the design can improve students‘ intercultural communication competence and its effectiveness.However,due to time constraints and other factors,there still needs for improvement of the study.The implications from the study are as the followings: How to cultivate students' intercultural communication competence still needs to be studied and perfected.Therefore,teachers should constantly study the appropriate methods and contents to find new ways to improve students' intercultural communication competence and intercultural teaching.At the same time,teachers should select suitable teaching materials and teaching contents for junior high school intercultural teaching,and explore a new way of junior high school intercultural English teaching.