Cultural Awareness Cultivation Based On The English Language Curriculum Standards For Senior High School

The 21^st century is an era of cross-cultural communication. Cross-cultural communication requires two types of competence, namely, linguistic competence and socio-cultural competence. With the development of the globalization, the world is becoming a "global village", where a variety of people with different skins, using different languages and from different countries as well as different cultural background are living together just like the "global villagers". This variety has led to changes in the goals, objectives, methods, strategies of foreign language teaching accordingly.The English Language Curriculum Standards for Senior High School (hereafter referred to as the Standards) issued in the year of 2003 by China's Ministry of Education, which place even greater importance on the cultivation of cultural-awareness than ever before, refer to cultural awareness as one of the five objectives of the senior English language curriculum and as critical in the appropriate use of the target language.Based on the objectives in the Standards, and associated with the reality of TEFL in China, this paper focuses on the necessity of cultural awareness cultivation, how to cultivate students' cultural awareness and the relevant demands on foreign language teachers;and it also puts forward a series of practical strategies as well as classroom activities to fulfill this significant project.The first chapter analyses the necessity of cultural awareness cultivation. Especially, from the survey about cultural awareness we obviously find that students' cultural awareness is quite poor;what's worse, they lack concrete and scientific guidance. The author also interprets the reasons for this problem.The second chapter illustrates some concepts about culture and its related theories, such as the relationship between language and culture, communicationand culture, as well as cultural awareness and TEFL, which forms the theoretical foundation of the whole paper. Meanwhile, the research situation on this program at home and abroad has been presented in this chapter.The third chapter, associated with the characteristics of the teaching materials and the teaching practice, deals with some effective strategies, approaches, methods and classroom activities to cultivate students' cross-cultural awareness. Special importance is laid to the following three aspects: firstly, increase cultural knowledge so as to strengthen students' cultural sensitivity;secondly, attach importance to cultural differences to improve students' ability of distinguishing cultures;thirdly, build up a cultural atmosphere in which to improve students' humanistic quality. Among the three aspects, increasing cultural knowledge to strengthen students' cultural sensitivity is an essential and fundamental premise;managing cultural differences to improve students' ability of distinguishing cultures is the key contents;and building up a cultural atmosphere to improve students' humanistic quality is an effective means.The fourth chapter points out that all the foreign language educators, the key factor in this significant project, will be burdened with this historic responsibility as well as demands of higher level and expectation.