Cultivation Of Cross-cultural Awareness Of Secondary School Students In ELT

As communicative symbol, a language is closely related with its culture. Lying in the same continuum, language, culture and communication cannot be separated from one another. With the cultivation of communicative ability which consists of linguistic competence and socio-cultural competence as its goal, the teaching of English should orient towards both linguistic knowledge and socio-cultural knowledge. The importance of integrating these two aspects into the classroom language teaching has been discussed in different journals, which has really exerted great influence on the ELT. But for different reasons things do not proceed as expected and required. In this connection, this dissertation, sets out to give a clear definition of communication, cross-cultural communication, discuss the relationships between these three aspects, and further expound the necessity to foster the sense of cross-cultural communication.The focal point in this dissertation lies in the importance of cultivating the students' sense of cross-cultural communication and integrating both the linguistic knowledge and sociocultural knowledge. The present author attempts to present principles and techniques in this area with the hope that the research can be of some help for middle school teachers to raise their awareness of the importance of socio-cultural knowledge and to integrate both linguistic and socio-cultural knowledge into classroom teaching so as to improve the students' ability to use English to communicate.