The Cultivation Of Cultural Awareness In Senior English Teaching

With the rapid development of science and technology, the world is becoming a "global village", and the cooperation and communication between people coming from different countries become more frequent than ever. So talents who have a good command of language knowledge and are skilled in intercultural communication are badly needed. The ultimate aim of Foreign Language Teaching in China is not only to pay much attention to the teaching of language itself but also to the appropriate use of the language. Language of a society is an aspect of its culture. The relation of language to culture is that of part to whole. Meanwhile, language is the carrier of culture and it is shaped and influenced by culture. It develops as culture develops. To some extent language teaching means culture teaching which can be achieved by cultivating the language learners'CA. Therefore, the cultivation of learners'CA should be made one of the important goals of Foreign Language Teaching in China and special attention should be paid to it.However, although for the first time CA is set as one of the five goals among the New Curriculum Criteria for senior English in China, the current situations of cultivating learners'CA is not so satisfactory among the senior high schools. The author of the thesis conducted an investigation among senior high school English teachers and students which reveals that quite a number of them are not satisfied with the CCA and are in great demand of a systematic and effective culture teaching.Meanwhile, on the assumption that CCA have positive effects on senior high school students' comprehensive language competence, a semester's experiment was carried out between two classes (EC and CC), aiming to find out whether proper techniques of CCA have positive influence on developing the senior high school students'CA, and if there was correlation between senior high school students'CCA level and English language level. The result of the experiment proved that the students' performances at the end of the experiment are much better than before the experiment both in linguistic competence and culture competence. What's more, the students in EC are more active than those in CC in English class and the learners'interest in learning English is aroused as well. Therefore, CCA can contribute to the learners' comprehensive language competence.Finally, some tentative suggestions in terms of current problems of the cultivation of cultural awareness from macro-level and micro-level are provided. In addition, suggestions for the future study are given in the end, in which the author hopes that this thesis can be of some help for FLT in senior English teaching.