The Relationship Between Cross-cultural Awareness And Business English Major's Listening At Secondary Vocational Schools

This thesis aims to search for the relationship between cross-cultural awareness and English listening ability of Business English majors at secondary vocational schools.Cross-cultural awareness has been applied in Chinese foreign language teaching practice for decades. It is arranged in various kinds of English textbooks and teachers are requested by the curriculums to make effort to cultivate students' cross-cultural awareness during English teaching in order to make students surrounded by the cultural atmosphere of the English-speaking countries unconsciously. However, there is not sufficient research done on cross-cultural awareness in English teaching in the context of secondary vocational schools, and also cross-cultural awareness has seldom been related to the Business English majors' English listening ability. English Teachers are devoted to searching for the methods to enhance Business English majors' listening ability all the time. English Teaching Syllabus at Secondary Vocational Schools, designated by Ministry of Education in China in 2009, the updated and revised one, unambiguously states "to cultivate the learners' culture awareness" as one of the teaching tasks at secondary vocational schools.The author of the thesis carried out a questionnaire survey on Grade Two students at secondary vocational schools on cross-cultural awareness. The questionnaire result shows that they have great interests in cross-cultural awareness during English learning although they can not clearly define the contents of it in detail.The research questions are:1. How do Business English majors define the cultural awareness?2. In the experimental procedure, which parts of the cross-cultural awareness could be the contents of listening training for the Business English majors?3. After cultivating the cross-cultural awareness, does Business English majors' listening ability distinguish from the former listening ability?After the questionnaire, the author applied cross-cultural awareness in general English listening classroom teaching to study the ways to enhance the Business English majors' English listening ability. The experiment was done among 59 second-year Business English majors from two paralleled classes in a secondary vocational schools from March to June in 2010. One class is the experimental class, and the other is the controlled class. Pre-tests were given to the students at the beginning of the experiment to have the homogeneity test. In the process of the experiment, all of the students used the same teaching material, entitled Business English Listening and Speaking (High Education Press), which is designated by Ministry of Education for secondary vocational schools, published in 2002. The author of the thesis used culture lectures, original listening and reading material--American president Obama's inaugural address, situational dialogue analysis, picture demonstrations by the foreign teacher, everyday English proverbs on whiteboard, blackboard designs of "look, see or watch" etc. in the experimental class to cultivate cross-cultural awareness and tried to find out the relationship between cross-cultural awareness and the improvement of Business English majors'listening.ability in secondary vocational schools. After the one-term experiment, the English listening test marks of the experimental class outperformed those of the controlled class. It is obvious that cross-cultural awareness can improve listening ability of Business English majors at secondary vocational schools.The significance of the study is that English teachers in secondary vocational schools are in need of the guiding theory of cultivating cross-cultural awareness, students'cross-cultural awareness should be inspired at any cost in the classroom teaching and teachers should not depend too much on the single English listening teaching method and students should really be regarded as the masters of the class.The limitations of the study are:1. Higher test marks could comparatively represent the enhancement of the English listening ability, but not absolutely:2. Subjects are only secondary vocational schools students who are majoring in Business English. Further research is needed to see if the same results would be gained from different samples.3. The samples of population were chosen from an ordinary secondary vocational school in Anshan, so it may has some geographical restrictions.4. Not all of the variables influencing English listening ability are controlled, for example, some individuals transferred to other schools in the process of the experiment.