Incorporating Cross-Cultural Awareness Into The English Class Teaching Of Higher Vocational College

Cultivation of cross-cultural communicative competence of the students is the basic and ultimate goal of foreign language teaching, especially in higher vocational college, and its improvement is made by means of enhancing their cross-cultural awareness and understanding the cultural differences between China and English-speaking countries.Cross-cultural awareness refers to the sensitivity to the differences and similarities between the alien culture and native culture, and people adjust to their own understanding of language and the consciousness which stems from the language when using foreign language according to the target language. Cross-cultural awareness is of great importance in the process of learning a foreign language, especially in the English class. Owing to the lack of it, the author carries out an empirical research to prove that the students in higher vocational college have a lower English level and a lower level degree of the culture of the target language.This thesis examines the status quo of cross-cultural awareness of the students in higher vocational college. It directs at finding out that the students have a relatively lower level of cross-cultural awareness and the English teachers in higher vocational college should incorporate it into English class teaching in order to cultivate the cross-cultural communicative competence of the students and meet the Basic Requirement for Higher Vocational and Technical College English Course.(we can use HVTC as its abbreviation, in this paper, the author uses Higher Vocational College to stand for HVTC for convenience, HVTC is also called Community College in foreign countries. )The thesis begins with the overview of the previous studies of the concepts of language, culture, the relationship between them, and also probes the relationships between communication and cross-cultural communication, and the awareness and cross-cultural awareness.The study was carried out among non-English major students in Higher Vocational College (College of Applied Technology, JiLin University). 300 questionnaires were handed out to the sample students and 287 were collected. The collected ones were analyzed with the help of the computer. Altogether, 10 multi-choice questions were asked in the questionnaire. The students who were selected randomly were required to fill in the questionnaires independently according to their own thinking and then the tables were listed, with table 1 demonstrating the major, the number, the percentage of the students involved, table 2 showing the choice percentage of each question, and demonstrating a clear picture of the correct answer of each question, (table 1 and table 2 were in chapter four) And then the author further analyzes the reason of choosing the correct answer and makes some explanations of differences between the West and the East. The questionnaire also reflects the status quo of the students' cross-cultural awareness. And finally the author also carries out a conclusion of this chapter.The author further proposes several feasible suggestions to enhance the cross-cultural awareness of the English teachers and then incorporate it into the English class so as to improve the students" cross-cultural awareness and their cross-cultural communicative competence. Limitations of this study were also pointed out at the final part of the thesis, such as the limitations of the scope of the students and higher vocational colleges.