A Study Of The Effects Of Performed Culture Approach On Junior High School Students’ English Listening Comprehension And Intercultural Sensitivity

Language and culture are inseparable.Nowadays,English teachers and researchers have paid more and more attention to learner’s comprehensive English language competence and their intercultural competence.In order to cultivate students’comprehensive language competence and cultural awareness,traditional teaching methods need to be improved.Performed culture approach integrates the culture knowledge and the language knowledge into the teaching of foreign language,and emphasizes the importance of using language in real context.This teaching method cultivates students’pragmatic ability and intercultural communication ability,and stimulates students’ interest in English learning to enhance their concept of lifelong learning.It emphasizes on fostering independence,autonomy and initiative of students which conforms to the requirements for quality education.This thesis mainly explores the effects of performed culture approach on junior high school students’ English listening comprehension and intercultural sensitivity by combining the qualitative research and quantitative research.The quantitative researches in this thesis are pre-test,mid-test,post-test and scale of teaching experiment.While the qualitative research is the semi-structured interview.The specific research questions of this thesis are as follows:1.What are the effects of performed culture approach on junior high school students’English listening comprehension?2.What are the effects of performed culture approach on junior high school students’ intercultural sensitivity?3.What are the participants’ attitudes and suggestions towards the performed culture approach?Participants were students from Class 3 and Class 4 of Buji Middle School in Shenzhen city.These two classes were both parallel classes,with similar results in pre-test and the same proportion of male and female.Among them,Class 3 was the experimental class and Class 4 was the control class.According to the principles of academic ethics and morality,students knew the teaching experiment beforehand.In the 18-week teaching experiment,the author used the results of pre-test,mid-test and post-test to analyze the effects of performed culture approach on students’ English listening comprehension.The results of the intercultural sensitivity scale were used to analyze the effects of performed culture approach on students’ intercultural sensitivity.Finally,the author summarized a teacher’s and twenty students’ attitudes and feasible suggestions towards the performed culture approach with the text analysis of semi-structured interviews.After data collection,the author used the computer and SPSS 25.0 software to analyze the data of tests,scales and interviews.Three results are obtained.Firstly,the performed culture approach can improve junior high school students’ English listening comprehension,especially for male’s English listening comprehension.Secondly,performed culture approach can improve the intercultural sensitivity of junior high school students,especially in these three dimensions:Respect for Cultural Differences,Interaction Confidence and Interaction Enjoyment.Thirdly,both the teacher and students held positive attitudes towards the performed culture approach,and suggested that in the process of applying this teaching method,teachers can optimize the evaluation methods,use more teaching resources and make appropriate adjustments to the course content.This study applies performed culture approach to junior high school English classroom.Through empirical research,it verified the effects of performed culture approach on junior high school students’ English listening comprehension and intercultural sensitivity,and provided a reference for the improvement of English teaching methods.