Cultivation Of Intercultural Awareness In Middle English Teaching

The development of science and technology in different times sets a different demand on foreign language teaching:Before the 19th centuries,the development of science and technology set a demand on traditional foreign language teaching.They paid more attention to the knowledge of Language,such as vocabulary,phrases, grammatical rules and so on But during the 19th century,the development of technology and society set a new demand on foreign language teaching-communication. So how to teach culture and improve students' intercultural communicative competence is an urgent task to foreign language teachers.However known from the foreign bibliography,the understanding seems to limit in such scope:The learner should learn the cultural knowledge on a foreign language and the teachers should emphasis the input of cultural knowledge,But cross-cultural teaching still occupies the primary stage.Based on the above,the author read some articles,papers and works on cultural teaching in a planned and purpose way.The author came to know that language and culture are inseparable.Language is a part of culture and plays a very important role in it.On the other hand,language is influenced and shaped by culture。The cultures differ from one another,and each culture is unique.As cultures are diverse,so language is diverse.So learning a language,as a matter of fact,is inseparable from learning its cultures." English teachers should input the culture of English-speaking countries gradually and appropriately in EFL teaching.As language teachers,we must be interested in the study of culture in the social scientist's sense of the world,not because we necessarily want to teach the culture of the other county but because we have to teach it.If we teach the language without teaching at the same time the culture in which it operates,we are teaching meaningless symbols or symbols to which the students attaches the wrong meaning;for unless he is warned,unless he receives cultural instructions,he will associate American concepts or objects with the foreign symbols" (Robert Politzer,1959,at Georgetown University Foreign Language Teaching,2003.2:81)But today teachers in middle schools still focus on the knowledge of language,and pay less attention to culture.As a result,the students' cultural awareness is low and their intercultural—communication competence can't meet the need of the development of society.In order to overcome these barriers,it is necessary and urgent for linguistic researchers and foreign language teachers to make further intercultural studies. The author made a detailed culture test and questionnaires to survey the current teaching in middle schools.The results show that both the teachers and the students' intercultural awareness are very weak.This thesis mainly argued the importance of cultural awareness in the process of learning a foreign language and tries to propose a set of effective approaches and principles for cultural input in middle schools.Such as creating an authentic classroom environment,role-play,comparisons and contrast,audio-visual,task-based and so on.It makes developing intercultural awareness an integral part of every lesson.It aims for students communicate efficiently and effectively with people from other cultures,to achieve multitudinous understanding and to gain better co-operation.The author gave a school's test result of her.From the figure,we can find that it is necessary to incorporate cultural knowledge into English teaching in middle schools, the progress in English learning is obvious.