Intercultural Awareness And English Reading Teaching

With the amazingly rapid development of science and technology, it naturally follows that intercultural contact has become more and more frequent. People receive various information they need through reading. Therefore, reading has become more significant than ever before. Reading is the main receptive skill, it is undoubtedly defined as the most important language skill in English learning and teaching. A student's achievement in the study and throughout his/her life depends in large part on his or her ability to read. It is very necessary to study the factors that affect students' reading comprehension in order to help students improve their reading ability.The research is based on intercultural awareness theory to explain why students fail to understand English reading materials. In English teaching, teachers usually pay more attention to linguistic schema and emphasize the importance of vocabulary and grammar in reading. Most of them ignore the students' intercultural awareness and seldom do they teach intercultural knowledge in reading class. Such a practice, as a result, often leads to the negative effect on students' reading ability development.The present dissertation attempts to try a new reading teaching method, that is attaching more importance to the intercultural awareness in English classes. It reports a study of some learner-centered reading class activities based on developing the students intercultural awareness, and how intercultural knowledge can affect students' reading comprehension. The study began with a questionnaire and a pre-study reading text, the purpose of which was to get to know how much general intercultural knowledge the students had already obtained and to assess the English reading ability of the 50 participants at the beginning of the author's study, so that the assessment results could be served to be the "baseline data" for a further research on those students' reading comprehension.The quantitative analysis of the questionnaire was used to provide a comprehensive estimation on the students' intercultural awareness in their reading. The analysis indicated that students' insufficient intercultural knowledge and the inadequate application of such limited knowledge resulted in their poor reading...