Cultural Awareness Cultivation Of Senior High School Students In The New English Curriculum

With the development of linguistic theory and the ever-increasing requirement of cross-cultural communication, cultural awareness cultivation, as one of the five objectives in English language teaching, is included in the new English Curriculum Standard (the experimental edition) issued in2003for the first time, and large amount of contents about the culture of English-speaking countries is added to the textbooks of middle school. Ten years has passed since the new curriculum was issued, and a systematic research on the cross-cultural awareness cultivation and cross-cultural communicative competence of senior high school students become a necessity to see the present situation of cross-cultural awareness and cross-cultural communicative competence of Chinese senior high school students, in this thesis the author tries to find out the present situation of which by using literature method, questionnaire method and interview method, and then analyzes the data collected in the investigation, and finally offers suggestions for the cultivation of cross-cultural awareness and cross-cultural communicative competence in Chinese EFL context.The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter one introduces the background information, the purpose and the significance of the study, the research questions and the structure of the thesis. Chapter two is the literature review, which is about the related definitions. It firstly introduces the definition and characteristic of language and culture and relationship between language and culture, and then reviews that of the cross-cultural awareness and cross-cultural communicative competence. Chapter three are the objectives of cultural awareness in the new English curriculum standard, cultural contents in senior high school textbook and cultural knowledge examined in college entrance examination. Chapter four is an investigation into cultural awareness and cross-cultural communication competence of Chinese senior high school students. It includes the objective and the procedure of the investigation and the results of it, that is, the students’cultural knowledge and cultural awareness. Chapter five discussed the implications of the investigation for English language teaching in China and some tentative suggestions are put forward to develop the cultural awareness and further improve cross-cultural communicative competence of senior high school students, and chapter six is the summary of the whole study.