A Study On The Cultivation Of Students’ Cultural Awareness In Junior Middle School English Teaching

Language has a rich cultural connotation,and in order to play the communicative function of language,students must not only master language skills and grammar knowledge,but also have cultural awareness.The Ministry of Education incorporated cultural awareness into the National English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education（2001）（NECS）and revised the standards in 2011 to improve and supplement the requirements for cultural awareness,emphasizing the importance of cultural awareness.Cultural awareness refers to cultural knowledge,cultural understanding,and intercultural communication awareness and competence.This thesis attempts to make study of cultivating students’cultural awareness in junior middle school English teaching,with schema theory and intercultural communication theory as the theoretical foundations.A total of 606 7^th and 8^th grade students and 33 English teachers in Wuhan Optical Valley Experimental school（WOVES）were selected as the subjects,and questionnaire,interview and class observation were the tools to collect data.The study focuses on the three research questions:（1）What is the current situation of cultural awareness of the 7^th and 8^th grade students in WOVES?（2）Are there any problems in cultivating students’cultural awareness in junior middle school English teaching?If any,what are they?（3）How to better cultivate students’cultural awareness in junior middle school English teaching?This study has the following findings:（1）Students’current level of cultural awareness is not high.Students in Grade 7 and 8 do not have a comprehensive grasp of cultural knowledge;questions 7-11 focus on cultural understanding,indicating that students have an open attitude;students’intercultural communication skills are weak compared to cultural knowledge and cultural understanding.（2）There are some problems in cultivating students’cultural awareness in junior middle school English teaching.First,the teaching objective of cultural awareness has not been implemented,lack of teaching time,cultural materials and teachers’own cultural awareness make it difficult to cultivate cultural awareness;in addition,the distribution of cultural contents in textbook（PEP）is unbalanced,and extra-curricular materials are all targeted exercises;what’s more,the content of cultural awareness is neglected in English tests,and lack of diversification in assessment system.Junior middle school education is a critical period of basic education and an important fundamental stage in the formation of students’emotional attitudes and value.Combining the psychological characteristics of junior middle school students,suggestions for cultivating students’cultural awareness in the junior middle school English class could be enhancing teachers’own cultural awareness,innovating cultural teaching methods,selecting versatile extracurricular materials,balancing the thematic distribution of cultural content,increasing the proportion of cultural content in English tests,and combining process assessment with summative assessment.It is hoped that the findings and suggestions of the study could be of some value for the reform of junior middle school English teaching and the cultivation of students’cultural awareness.There are also some limitations in this study.At first,the selection of research subjects is limited,covering only the 7^th and 8^thgrade students and English teachers from one middle school,which implies a lack of sample representativeness.Next,the distribution of cultural awareness related items in English exams was based on teachers’opinions,without textual analysis of the test papers,the results may not be objective enough.Finally,some teaching suggestions are made in the article,but there is no practical proof of the effectiveness of these teaching suggestions on cultivating students’cultural awareness.There is still a need for a lot of research and evidence on effective ways to cultivate junior middle school students’cultural awareness in English teaching,and comprehensive and scientific ways to evaluate students’English knowledge and cultural awareness.