A Study On The Application Of Experiential Teaching Method In The Cultivating Of Cross-cultural Awareness Of High School Students In Inner Mongolia

With the general trend of globalization,communication between countries become inevitable.The role of English communicative competence in cross-cultural communication is becoming more and more important.Therefore,the development of cross-cultural competence is considered to be the key point in foreign language teaching.Traditional English teaching emphasizes on the development of language skills and lacks attention to the development of cross-cultural awareness.Therefore,the development of cross-cultural awareness in the process of English teaching has become an urgent topic to be dealt with nowadays.Currently,there is a problem of neglecting cultural experience in the process of developing cross-cultural awareness in high school English.Therefore,in this thesis,84 students from the second middle school in Ulan Hot City,Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region are used as the subjects of this study,and the process of their cultural experience is taken as the starting point and the experiential teaching method is used to focus on the process of their cultural experience.In this thesis,the experiential teaching method is applied to the development of cross-cultural awareness,and we intend to investigate the following questions.1.How does the experiential method influence the development of students’cross-cultural awareness?2.How does the experiential method influence students’ level of cultural knowledge?3.What is the students’ feedback on the application of experiential method in the development of cross-cultural awareness?This study was conducted students into two groups to implement a semester of experimental teaching.One class was the experimental group,and the author used the experiential teaching method to teach English culture.The other class was the control group and was taught using traditional cultural content.Data for the study were collected by questionnaire,tests,and interview.The results of the data were then compared using independent sample t-test and paired sample t-test analysis to elaborate each research question.In the pre-experimental stage,a questionnaire on interculturalism was administered to the study participants,and the results indicated that the cross-cultural awareness and cross-cultural knowledge of the two classes were basically at the same level.In the middle of the experiment,the author applied the experiential teaching method to the development of cross-cultural awareness as the basis of teaching,and designed the lecture content as well as the classroom activities in a contextual manner.After the experiment,a post-test was administered to the experimental group and the control group,and the results were compared with the pre-test to test whether the experiential teaching method was effective in developing students’ cross-cultural awareness and cross-cultural knowledge.The results of the experiment were as follows:(1)The embedding of experiential teaching was effective in promoting high school students’ sensitivity to cross-cultural awareness.(2)The embedding of experiential teaching was effective in enhancing high school students’accumulation of cultural knowledge,cultural awareness,and transforming their stance toward cultural differences thus effectively contributing to the cultivation of cross-cultural awareness.At the same time,(3)the application of experiential method obtained feedback from students on detailed matters such as the selection of lecture topics and tasks,and the conception of activities.Based on the findings of this thesis,the author proposes recommendations for future teaching:the development of cross-cultural awareness should emphasize the creation of an experiential teaching environment to stimulate students’ interest in learning.At the same time,teachers should continue to enrich their own cultural knowledge in order to promote students’ cultural foundation more effectively in their teaching practice.