A Study Of Junior High School Teachers’ Intercultural Teaching Competence In English Reading Class

With the rapid development of the world economic integration,training high-quality talents with intercultural competence has become a focused area in the research of foreign language teaching.In the meanwhile,China has explicitly incorporated cultural awareness into the core contents of English teaching,and it puts forward higher requirements for English teachers‘ intercultural English teaching.Improving reading ability is one of the important goals in the Chinese junior high school‘s English teaching.Therefore,this paper investigates the factors which affect teachers‘ intercultural teaching and the common problems in the English reading class of junior high schools;the paper also tries to put forward pedagogical suggestions for improving teachers‘ intercultural competence.In this study,the questionnaire was used to investigate 149 junior high school English teachers‘ intercultural teaching current situation in reading class.In addition,the semi-structured in-depth interview was conducted with 8 junior high school teachers to deepen understanding of the difficulties they encountered in intercultural teaching.At the same time,the classroom observation method was used to observe the teachers‘intercultural teaching behavior,and recorded in the scales.The following three questions are discussed: 1)What are the factors affecting junior high school teachers‘ intercultural teaching practice in English reading class? 2)What are the common problems in junior high school teachers‘ intercultural teaching in terms of three aspects,namely cognition,emotion,and behavior? 3)How can teachers effectively improve their intercultural teaching competence in English reading class?The results are as follows.First,in English reading class,teachers‘ intercultural foreign language teaching is mainly influenced by the following factors: teachers‘intercultural knowledge,teachers‘ intercultural awareness,teachers‘ teaching strategies,the way of students‘ intercultural learning,the quantity of intercultural contents in textbooks,and the allocation of cultural teaching time.Second,problems existed in the teaching of intercultural reading class for junior high school English teachers: 1)From the aspect of cognition,teachers are vague about intercultural competence and other related concepts,and their intercultural awareness is not obvious;2)From the aspect of emotion,teachers do not have the appropriate attitude in intercultural teaching,and they also lack confidence and are not good at integrating Chinese culture into English education;3)From the aspect of behavior,teachers cannot grasp students‘ needs in intercultural learning,and they lack the intercultural teaching objectives as well as various teaching methods.Third,teachers‘ reasonable integration of intercultural objectives and content in English reading teaching can effectively improve students‘ intercultural competence.Therefore,teachers can take the following measures to improve their intercultural teaching competence in reading teaching: teachers should dig more in-depth into the cultural content in reading textbooks and enrich the intercultural materials;teachers should balance the proportion of language-teaching and culture-teaching in reading class,and they need to increase the time of intercultural teaching consciously;they need to accurately grasp students‘ intercultural learning needs,enrich intercultural teaching methods,and explore new ways of intercultural teaching.This research is helpful for English teachers and researchers to identify the factors affecting intercultural teaching and its common problems,and it can also provide inspiration and suggestions for in-service teachers to effectively improve their intercultural teaching competence.Moreover,it also provides a perspective and direction for intercultural foreign language teaching in the stage of basic education.