On Cultivating Intercultural Awareness And Competence Of Senior High School Students In Enlish Teaching

With the development of communication and transportation, the globalization of world economy, the widespread population migrations that lead to multicultural workforce and society, intercultural communicative competence becomes a required ability for citizens in the 21st century to survive and live meaningfully and productively. To communicate effectively with people from different cultures, an individual needs to develop an intercultural competence— which can be built from the ability of intercultural awareness, sensitivity and competence. In short, respect for other culture is the foundation of effective intercultural communication.Our ELT should be a practical and effective procedure in developing students' intercultural communicative competence, which is almost ignored in middle schools because of the test-oriented teaching aim, the different levels of the teachers' quality and other causes. For a long time, Middle School teaching has accepted and practiced the teaching method which was based on the theory of structuralism. It emphasized the cognition in the structure. Knowledge such as vocabulary, phrases, grammatical rules and so on is paid too much attention to. While the cultural background of the target language is ignored. As a result, the students who have learned English for many years often made mistakes in the communication because of the lack of culture differences between two languages.It is well known that the accurate use of language is related to the knowledge of culture. The linguistic research proved that the language contains all the experiences of the national social life which reflects the characteristic of culture. Thus, the language and the use of language can not exist without culture. Just as Brown pointed out "Language, the means for communication among members of a culture is the most visible and available expression of that culture, cultural patterns, customs and what of life.(Brown, 1994:170)" So it's impossible for us to master a foreign language without learning its culture. The knowledge of language and the training of basic techniques should be put into the background of its culture so that the students can obtain the ability of language application.