English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School Based On The Cultivation Of Cross-cultural Awareness

Vocabulary is one of the essential elements of language, and language can't exist without vocabulary. Vocabulary teaching is the foundation of language teaching. Its efficiency is directly related with success or failure of the ultimate goal of language teaching. However, traditional vocabulary places great emphasis on morphological change, spelling, pronunciation and literal meaning, etc. Besides, the traditional way of explaining the vocabulary makes students feel dull, boring, lacking in interest and enthusiasm,even forget words easily. What's worse, the insufficient attention to vocabulary leads to the misunderstanding and misuse of those culturally significant words. In order to solve these problems, author refers to literature, observes and evaluates the experts'classes in many popular schools. The author also communicates with some teachers and finds that teachers need to change the teaching methods. Vocabulary is considered as a tool of carrying cultural information and reflecting social and cultural life. English vocabulary teaching based on the cultivation of cross-cultural awareness, namely introducing culture to vocabulary teaching, is to make students understand the cultural connotations of vocabulary by combining context and situation to explain vocabulary. Then vocabulary teaching based on cultivation of cross-cultural awareness can change disadvantages of traditional vocabulary teaching. It can not only enhance the students' vocabulary learning interest and enthusiasm, enrich its cultural knowledge as well, but also make students achieve accurate use of vocabulary in communication and avoid misunderstanding and communication barriers, thus improving their intercultural communication competence.In the paper, the goals, content, and principles of vocabulary teaching in high school are discussed. In addition, cross-cultural teaching principles, the related concepts and the new curriculum standards for cross-cultural awareness requirements are also discussed. In order to lay the foundation for carrying out combining cultivation of cross-cultural awareness and English vocabulary teaching in high school, the domestic and foreign development present situation of vocabulary teaching are combined. The methods of introducing culture to vocabulary are introduced. This thesis takes two classes from a certain senior high school where the author works as the object of research and the research methods are such as questionnaire and experiment. It aims to find out the significance of the new English vocabulary teaching methods in senior high school by comparing and analyzing the results of pre-experiment and post-experiment tests.The experiment results suggest that: First, the new vocabulary teaching method is beneficial to enhancing students'learning motivation, interest, and enthusiasm. Second, the teacher's introduction of culture during vocabulary teaching can contribute to students'comprehension of English culture and improving students'intercultural awareness by introducing culture to vocabulary learning, which also helps students acquire the certain ability of intercultural communication. Third, through teacher's setting different cultural contexts, the students can acquire vocabulary in communication, thus reducing students'vocabulary forgetting rate.Through this research, the following enlightenments are obtained: Teachers should follow the practical principle, progressive principle,the principle of moderation,the principle of combination and the principle of equal communication in the process of English vocabulary teaching based on cultivation of cross-cultural awareness. Also teachers should utilize flexible methods of introducing culture,fully reflect the teachers' leading role and students' main body position as well in the use of vocabulary teaching culture methods. When we know it is good for students to use new method for vocabulary teaching, we can't deny the traditional teaching method completely. If we combine the two methods, we can improve teaching effects better.