The Cultivation Of Intercultural Awareness In High School English Teaching

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 social-cultural competence as its goal, the teaching of English should orient towards both linguistic knowledge and socio-cultural knowledge. English-teaching is not only the teaching course about the English language itself, but the course of understanding English culture background 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 thesis, sets out to give a clear definition of culture, intercultural communication, discuss the relationships between these three aspects, and further expound the necessity to foster the sense of intercultural communication.The focal point in this thesis lies in the importance of cultivating the students* intercultural awareness and integrating both the linguistic knowledge and socio-cultural knowledge. The present author attempts to present principle and techniques in this area with the hope that the research can be of some help for high 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.According to the above theory, during English-teaching, we should gradually introduce eastern and western culture background knowledge integrating with the textbooks, and we should consciously instruct the students to understand the differences between English culture and Chinese culture, enhance the students' intercultural awareness. We educate their culture quality which is needed when they interact with the people from different cultures. Try to avoid misunderstanding because of pragmatic mistakes not grammatical mistakes.