Enhancing Cultural Awareness Of Senior High School Students In English Class

Under the influence of globalization, the increasing communication with the rest of the world and the consequent resources sharing have now become a general and powerful trend that pushes our country to keep pace with the global development. Therefore, the vital goal of foreign language teaching is to cultivate high-quality young talents with an outstanding intercultural competence. Since language is the tool of communication, as well as the carrier of culture, a person learning a language without knowing its culture cannot comprehend much of the meaning implicit behind the words, let alone the social and historical overtones superimposing the surface of language. As a result, communication will be severely impeded. In the recent twenty years or so, most English teachers in China have begun to attach more importance to integrating culture into foreign language teaching. Therefore, the research on language and culture, culture and communication, foreign language teaching and cultural teaching has been given more and more focus both among language scholars and teachers. Consequently, cultural teaching as an essential aspect of a foreign language course is introduced into the high school education. Cultivating students’ cultural awareness and intercultural competence is officially included in the New English Curriculum Standards, illustrated exhaustively as a key point to language acquisition. However, in most of the reality and practice of English learning and teaching, variously due to a long-standing tradition of pedagogical methods and patterns upheld firmly by most teachers, arduous overload of home assignments, and most critically, a weak cultural awareness both in teachers and students’mind, seldom can cultural teaching be effected in English class so as to ensure a better understanding of the close relationship between language teaching and cultural awareness. Although we are now using new English textbooks as required by the new curriculum standards, yet there seems to be little change in our teaching and leaning methods in the sense the requirements prescribed in the new standards. On the account of this incongruous situation, this thesis is devoted, in its limited and tentative way, to dealing with the challenge of how to enhance the cultural awareness of high school students in English teaching so as to develop their intercultural competence. As the major carrier of culture, language cannot be meaningfully acquired merely as a linguistic phenomenon, isolated somehow from culture. In other words, language is by no means to be taught and learned for its own sake, for it is intrinsically related to culture. It is in this very sense that cultural awareness is critically instrumental in English class where the students are supposed to be merged in culture-rich texts and contexts. This paper, therefore, has made great efforts, first of all, to underline the high necessity for nurturing the students’cultural awareness, which is so far so poor in the high school; and based on and prompted by this state of things, the author argues for the ways and means of enhancing cultural awareness in English class. Finally, drawing on her teaching experiences and inspired by others’ideas, she makes some particular suggestions for strategies for cultivating and enhancing cultural awareness.