On The Cultivation Of Students’ Cross-cultural Awareness In English Reading Teaching Of Senior High Schools

As the society develops rapidly and people in different countries are in need ofcommunicating and cooperating, cross-cultural communicative awareness first appeared in thenew English Curriculum Standard and cultivating inter-cultural communicative competence ofthe students has also become the ultimate goal of foreign language teaching.So teachers should not only adhere to English reading teaching, but also pay more attentionto the culture teaching. What’s more, teachers should direct students to learn the culturaldifferences between Chinese and English through infiltration and integration of the culturalknowledge and eventually promote students’intercultural communicative awareness. So it isnecessary for teachers to help activate students’ schema existing in the brain and form thecorresponding linguistic schema through the infiltration of cultural background knowledge.If the students can use the Schema Theory in reading, it will contribute to graspingconnotation, structure, main idea of the article, which will have a great influence on languagelearning. The familiarity and sensitivity for the culture is in turn helpful for students to learnmore about English culture, and broaden their knowledge and improve students’ comprehensiveability. It plays a guiding role in the process of learning and helps to achieve the teaching goal.However, there are some limitations for cultural teaching in Middle Schools. The traditionalmethods of cultural teaching need to be updated. It still focuses on the important roles of teachersand grammar learning in English teaching, and a majority of teachers are required to get trainedon how to strike the balance between cultural teaching and language teaching.In order to demonstrate the cultivation of students’culture in EFL reading, the authorselected two classes, and Class 5 is the experimental class, and Class 6 is the control class. In thereading teaching for experiment class, the author provides students with necessary guidance andstimulate their interests, initiatives and creativities. Meanwhile, for control class, the authornever gives special training in activating the relative cultural background knowledge and onlydirects reading skills and do some training practice to improve their reading ability .Theexperiment lasts for one year, namely, two terms in Senior Grade One. The author adopts someteaching methods for the research: comparative method, reading and inferring strategy, classical literature appreciation, role—playing and multimedia aided teaching method.The article is to prove that cultural teaching is of great vital importance to English readingteaching in senior high school. The author hopes that the result of the experiment can give usEnglish teachers some indications and suggestions.