Cultural Awareness Cultivation In Senior Middle Schools In The Background Of New Curriculum Standard Reformation

This thesis is about an empirical research on the cultural awareness cultivation in senior middle school English teaching.There is a unanimous consensus among scholars and language educators from abroad and in China that CA cultivation is an essential part in foreign language education.Scholars from abroad have laid solid theoretical foundation in the field of CA studies,such as Byram's theory of 'self' and 'otherness'(1989),Kramsch's theory of 'the third place'(1993),Tomalin and Stempleski's goals of cultural instruction(1993).In 2001,the Education Department of China issued the English Curriculum Standard in which for the first time in history the cultivation of CA was prescribed as one of the five objectives in English Language Teaching(ELT).Some Chinese scholars focus their research on CA cultivation and learning situation in China such as Cao wen(1998),Liu Baojun(2006) and Li Huiping(2003) etc.They have put up many proposals concerning the objectives,contents,teaching and learning methods of CA development for Chinese language learners.However,not much empirical research has been done to find out the status quo or the real implementation of CA cultivation in middle schools.Can textbook under New Curriculum Standard reformation help cultivate students' CA? Besides textbooks,what are those possible factors influencing students' CA cultivation? Are there any difficulties teachers and students have come across that deserve special attention? Does the students' CA ability live up to the expectations that is to enhance a sense of globalization? On the grounds of the questions,an empirical research was done in this M.A thesis to find out the status quo of CA cultivation in Senior middle schools.In this reseach one hundrand and six senior middle three students and four middle school teachers were chosen from two parallel schools in two different regions.Quiz, questionnaire and interviews were used to find out students' CA competency,how CA cultivation was conducted and the problems they encountered.Comparisons were made between the two schools to find out whether there was a difference in students' CA competency,the factors influncing the existance or non-existance of the difference, the way they conducted CA cultivation and possible problems they had.Quantitative data were dealt with by SPSS 13.0 and Qualitative Data were analyzed pattern matching technique(Miles & Huberman,1994;Spradley,1980).The major findings are:1) The CA competency of the students is relatively high which means CA cultivation in senir middle schools has made certain achievements.2) There exists difference in students' CA competency from the two schools. Differences in learning context of CA cultivation,teachers and students' attitudes towards culture learning,teachers' and students' cultural and language competency are the main reasons for the difference in students' CA competency.3) The insufficiency of time and the pressure exerted by exams is the main obstacle to students' culture cultivation.