An Empirical Study On Students’ Intercultural Awareness—a Case Study Of English Reading Classes In A Junior High School

Intercultural communication skill has become one of the necessary qualities in the age of globalization.Therefore,it is necessary to cultivate students’ intercultural awareness in English class.Reading class is the most important part of middle school English language teaching in China.With the implementation of the curriculum reform,objectives in terms of intercultural knowledge were written in English Curriculum Standard for Junior High School(2003).Hence,it is vital to raise students’ intercultural awareness in middle school English language teaching.At the meantime,a great many previous researches show that cross-cultural awareness could help students with their reading comprehension.This paper examines middle school students’ proficiency of intercultural awareness and its influence on their reading ability by selecting 83 students and 10 teachers as subjects in both quantitative and qualitative way.To obtain reliable results,the test paper is completed by the author with the help of two teachers.Afterwards,it is reviewed and modified by eight other teachers.The research requires students to independently finish the questionnaires and the tests without references within 30 minutes.After the questionnaire is completed,the author has one-on-one interview with three teachers.Moreover,the researcher mainly uses SPSS 17.0 to analyze the results of the texts and questionnaires,and the conclusions are listed as follows.Firstly,students have great interests in foreign culture,and have high motivation of intercultural knowledge learning.Diverse cultural knowledge teaching methods attract students to cross-cultural knowledge and English language learning.Secondly,both the teachers and the students recognize the significance of intercultural awareness and firmly believe that it can improve students’ English reading performance.However,the results show that students do not have much intercultural awareness which are reflected in their communication skills,in particular.Thirdly,there is a positive correlation between students’ intercultural awareness and their reading performances,which means the higher of students’ intercultural awareness,the better their reading performances will be.On the basis of the results,the study concludes the reasons behind students’ lack of intercultural awareness in three aspects: first,students do not have much input of cultural content because of the pressure upon their schoolwork.Second,there is no evaluation criterion of cultural learning in curriculum standard.Third,teachers with inadequate cross-cultural skills is another important reason.Finally,according to the analysis,the author provides suggestions in terms of the research objective s and further study.Though there are still some limitations in the research such as the small number of subjects and researcher’s lack of experience,the research results can help to improve junior high school students’ intercultural awareness to some extent.