Developing The Students' Intercultural Awareness In English Teaching In Chinese Middle Schools

With the rapid development of science and technology, theglobalization is the main-stream of world development. People indifferent societies, cultures and places are anxious to communicate withone another. However, people soon realized that they have often lots ofdisagreements, misunderstanding, and even culture shocks in theircommunication and co-operation with the native speakers. As researchreveals, those breakdowns and misunderstandings have a lot to do withcultural knowledge of the country whose language is being learned. Thatis to say, people are lack of intercultural communicative competence.The development of science and technology in different times sets adifferent demand on foreign language teaching, it is necessary and urgentfor linguistic researchers and foreign language teachers to develop theintercultural awareness in English teaching. However, traditionalapproach of English teaching only stays at sentences level. It pays majorattention to the forms of language like pronunciation, vocabulary, orgrammar, etc., and thus ignores the culture teaching. In order to solve theproblem, the author made a detailed culture test and questionnaires tosurvey the current situation of culture teaching in English teaching inmiddle schools. The result shows that:1) The sample students' cultural knowledge and interculturalawareness are very weak, and it influences their cultural learning and thedeveloping of intercultural communicative competence.2) The practice in target cultural context is a key point for ChineseEnglish learners' acquisition of cultural knowledge and culturalawareness, but it has been neglected.3) Most of the sample teachers are now aware that language teachingcan't be separated from cultural teaching. However, the teachers don'tknow how to do it due to the lack systematic cultural knowledge, and thelimitation of teaching periods.4) The sample teachers' main methods of cultural input are notsatisfactory. The teaching method is still based on teacher-center andgrammar-center. The majority of teachers of English need systematicallytrain in foreign culture teaching. Some of the textbooks need to berewritten.As we know, language and culture are inseparable just like two sidesof a coin. Language is a part of culture and plays a very important role init. On the other hand, language is influenced and shaped by culture. If weteach the language without teaching at the same time the culture in whichit operates, we are teaching meaningless symbols or symbols to which thestudents attaches the wrong meaning. Cultural awareness refers to anunderstanding of one's own and others' cultures that affect how peoplethink and behave. Lacking cultural awareness, one may interpret theother's verbal and non-verbal actions from his/her own culture'sorientation and be led to miscommunication.The author thinks that developing intercultural awareness is the keyfactor lead to successful intercultural communication. But from theliterature review we can see that cultural teaching still occupies theprimary stage. There are only a few studies on how to developintercultural awareness in English teaching in middle schools, and thesestudies mainly focus on the English major students, but it is a lack ofsystematic analysis for the input of culture. Only by developing themiddle-school students' cultural awareness proficiency, can we say thatthe whole students' English ability is improved.Based on the investigation and study, this paper discussed theimportance of developing intercultural awareness in foreign languageteaching in middle schools, and proposes a set of principles andapproaches of developing intercultural awareness and cultural input, suchas, teaching culturally-loaded words and phrases, role-play, the groupco-operation, film, television, periodical lecture, comparing westernculture with Chinese culture and so on.The trial aims for this study is to realize the importance of cultureteaching and make developing intercultural awareness an integral part ofevery lesson in order to help students communicate efficiently andeffectively with people from other cultures.