A Comparative Study On Cultivating Students’ Cultural Awareness Between Exemplary And Regular English Reading Lessons In Senior High Schools

Cultural awareness has been proposed as one of the key competencies in English reading in the new English curriculum standard of general high school.The importance of cultivating students’ cultural awareness is evident.However,due to various reasons,teachers ignore the cultivation of students’ cultural awareness sometimes.Based on this,thesis conducts a comparative study on cultivating students’ cultural awareness between exemplary and regular English reading lessons to investigate the following questions: 1.What are the similarities and differences in cultivating students’ cultural awareness between exemplary and regular English reading lessons in senior high schools? 2.What are the specific strategies for cultivating students’ cultural awareness in teaching English reading lessons in senior high schools?This study takes exemplary reading lessons,regular reading lessons and English teachers as research subjects,and uses classroom observation as well as interview to collect data.Classroom observation aims to find out the differences and similarities in cultivating students’ cultural awareness between exemplary and regular English reading lessons in senior high schools.Through analyzing the classroom observation results,it can conclude that all the teachers acknowledged the importance of cultural awareness in senior high school English reading class,and also cultural contents are involved in their lessons to some extent.For the teaching contents,all the teachers mainly focus on literature and arts and values.Also,there are several differences between exemplary and regular English reading lessons in terms of organization forms,student engagement,types of teaching materials as well as teaching methods.Interview is employed to gain more personal and specific views of teachers on cultivating students’ cultural awareness.The number of teachers participating in the interview is six.Thematic analysis as well as quantifying the interview data are used to analyze the interview data.The results of interview show that all participants attach great importance to cultivating students’ cultural awareness,but they cannot fully conduct cultural teaching due to various reasons.Based on the interview data,the following suggestions are proposed.First,teachers’ own level of cultural awareness should be improved to ensure the knowledge support of cultivating students’ cultural awareness.Also,teaching methods should be enriched to improve students’ interest in learning cultural knowledge.It is necessary that evaluation system should be improved to ensure the quantification of cultural awareness.And it could be better if cultural awareness can be emphasized in daily life to improve students’ cultural awareness subtly.In view of the above findings,this thesis has the following suggestions:(1)teachers should cultivate their own cultural awareness and make a balance between linguistic knowledge teaching and the cultivation of cultural awareness;(2)the examination and evaluation system should be improve;(3)study Standards to find out new ideas and principles about cultivating students’ cultural awareness.