The Research On The Cultivation Of The High School Students' Inter-cultural Awareness And Competence In Senior English Reading Class

Modern society has made intercultural communication a necessity. With the development of science and technology, the world seems to be shrinking. the contact between people of different cultures becomes more and more frequent. How to make teaching of English meet the needs of social and economic development has become an urgent task to English teachers. Especially developing learners' intercultural communicative competence is drawing more attention in English teaching. Obviously this is a challenge to most senior English teachers.Intercultural communication was introduced into China by Hu Wenzhong and other scholars in the 1980s. Ever since then many Chinese scholars and foreign language teachers have been working in this field and have tried to apply the findings in their research to English teaching. RC (Reading Course) has been considered as the essential component of EFL (English as Foreign Language) teaching and learning. Unfortunately, in China, most reading teaching methods adopted in RC are to read the text quickly, retell the text, answer questions, and do multiple choices and so on. The result of such teaching methods is that students neglect the culture learning.It is well known that in many cases, students misunderstand or feel puzzled over the meaning a sentence conveys, even though they understand every single word and all the grammatical structures. Actually, it is cultural background knowledge that blocks readers' understanding. A great number of tests show that the hurdle of English reading comprehension exists not only in vocabulary and grammar, but also in background knowledge and cultural information. In the past two decades, much attention has been given to the cultural effect on reading comprehension. Researcher and scholars home and abroad have reached a consensus that readers'cultural background knowledge could make comprehension of the reading materials much easier. So, in English reading classes, teachers should make students acquire cultural competence as much as possible.The importance of culture teaching in language class has been gradually recognized by teachers, especially those who are teaching the advanced level of English; while it's also true that the ignorance of culture teaching is a widespread phenomenon now in Senior English teaching practice. Thus the purpose of this thesis is to study the current practice of cultural instruction in Senior middle school and to draw teachers'attention on culture teaching in the language class, especially in English reading.This thesis consists of five chapters as follows:Chapter1 illustrates the present situation in culture teaching and in inter-cultural communication and the development of learner's inter-cultural communication (ICC).Chapter2 introduce the definition on culture, communication and inter-cultural communication abd the relationship among them. Chapter 3 About my an investigation of Chinese secondary school Learnings'ICC competence.. Chapter 4 analysis some comprehension bariers and problems Chinese students meet in reading process and how to overcome these problems.Chapter 5 raises some suggestions on teachers'professional development and practicable culture teaching techniques in English reading teaching.