The Cultivation Of Cultural Awareness In Vocational School English Study

With the fast development of Chinese society, communication between China and other nations throughout the world are more and more frequent, so cross-cultural communicative competence is put forward to be the ultimate goal of foreign language teaching (FLT) in China, and cross-cultural awareness or cultural awareness is prescribed in the New English Curricular Standard (NECS) for the first time.Cultural awareness refers to the sensitivity and insight to the native and target culture, the self-consciousness of adjusting one's own language understanding and output to cope with the target culture when using the target language. Because of the indivisibility of language and culture, culture teaching should be integrated with language teaching in English teaching. However, most English teachers in China always take the misunderstanding that culture teaching means only the teaching of cultural knowledge itself but ignore the cultivation of students'cultural awareness, let alone the English teachers in vocational schools. In fact, cultivating students'cultural awareness is the goal of culture teaching, and cultural knowledge is the base of the cultivation of cultural awareness, that is, cultural awareness is gradually cultivated in learning and absorbing cultural knowledge, which then paves the way for culture understanding. Therefore, as a vocational school English teacher, in this thesis the author aims at exploring the approaches of how to involve the cultivation of cultural awareness in English teaching.The thesis reviews the theory about culture teaching and cultural awareness as the basis of the research and further analysis. It starts with the review of former studies on culture both abroad and at home, and also a view of the present situation of culture teaching, especially those problems in culture teaching. Culture teaching is long neglected or taken as a subordinate part of the language teaching in English teaching. Worse still, the means of culture teaching is sole and simple; the aim of culture teaching is misunderstood as a glimpse of cultural knowledge only, but not as an essential step to develop students'correct attitudes and beliefs to the target culture. Therefore, the cultivation of cultural awareness is nearly wholly ignored in English teaching. This reality of English teaching results just from the influence of the old English teaching method, the teacher's lack of cultural knowledge and cross-cultural awareness, and the obscure understanding of culture teaching. To vocational school students, the low level of English standard is also a main problem.Based on the above analysis, the author researched these problems through an experiment, which included a test, a questionnaire for students and an interview both for the students and the teachers. Then after the experiment, the paper recommends the approaches for cultivating students'cultural awareness in class, including comparing cultural differences, teaching culture-loaded vocabularies, supplying cultural background, having culture-featured classroom activities and strengthening students'awareness to non-verbal communication, and so on; out of class, however, the cultivation of cultural awareness relies on experiencing English culture in the way of reading literature, surveying newspapers, enjoying films and music as well as surfing Internet.Although the concept of cultural awareness is abstract and the cultivation of it is one of the most difficult dimensions to attain, the goals of both English teaching and English culture teaching can be obtainable if the English teachers in vocational schools hold a clear understanding of culture teaching and cultural awareness and apply some suitable approaches in English teaching.