The Cultivation Of Cross-cultural Awareness In Middle School English Teaching

The globalization of the world economy and the development of the informationtechnology make the communication between countries become increasingly frequent. As a toolof communication, language is very important. So higher requirements have been put forwardfor English teaching.As we all know, language is both the sign of communication and also the carrier of culture.It is a part of culture and plays a very important role in it. On the other hand, language isinfluenced and shaped by culture. So learning a foreign language is not just learning words andgrammar on the surface. Instead, it should be a process of cultural learning. Therefore, from theperspective of linguistics, to teach a language is also to teach its culture, and learning alanguage is a process of cultural acquisition. And the ultimate purpose of learning a foreignlanguage is to cultivate the comprehensive ability of using a language and to apply itsuccessfully in the process of cross-cultural communication.The author thinks that cultivating cross-cultural awareness is the key factor leads tosuccessful cross-cultural communication. Lacking cross-cultural awareness, one may interpretthe other’s verbal and non-verbal actions from his/her own culture’s orientation and be led tomiscommunication. Then what is cross-cultural awareness? It refers to an understanding ofone’s own and others’cultures that affects how people think and behave.In our middle school English teaching, the concept of culture teaching is lack of popularityand attention and the state of cross-cultural awareness of teachers and students is still far fromsatisfactory. And it is necessary and urgent for foreign language teachers to cultivate thecross-cultural awareness in English teaching.Based on the current state and the investigation and study, this paper, by the means ofinvestigation, test, experiment and interview, first reviews the related research of abroad anddomestic, then gives the concepts of language, culture and cross-cultural awareness and also therelationship between them. Then through the investigation on English cultural knowledge of thestudents, the paper discusses how to permeate the cultural knowledge teaching and explore theways of training students’cross-cultural awareness. The author conducts a cultural test and questionnaire survey in order to understand the status of cultural teaching in middle school. Theresults show that students’cross-cultural awareness is very weak and deficiencies still exist inthe culture teaching. The author selects two parallel classes in LaiGang High School as theexperimental class and the control class for the experiment, and then conducts interactive andsharing culture teaching in the experimental class. Comparison of results of pretest and posttestshows that culture teaching is necessary and the progress of students is obvious. In addition, theauthor also interviews some related teachers and students and concluded that the cultivation ofcross-cultural awareness can improve students’English language ability, which supports theexperiment.The author also provides a model teaching plan of a lesson to show how culture should beinvolved in English teaching.The significance of the research lies in understanding the cross-cultural communicationlevels of the middle school students and the deficiencies exist in the teaching through culturaltest and questionnaire; in discussing how to permeate the cultural knowledge teaching andcultivate the cross-culture awareness through experiment and interview. This paper discussesthe necessity necessary of cultivating cross-cultural awareness in foreign language teaching inmiddle schools, and proposes principles and approaches. The author hopes that the research canbe of some help for teachers to raise their cultivating cross-cultural awareness so as to improvethe students’ ability to use English to communicate.