An Empirical Study Of The Cultivation Of Rural High School Students’ Intercultural Awareness

With the increasing international communication, intercultural communicationbecomes more and more important. However, students with much basic knowledge ofEnglish language are unable to meet the demands of our society, which attaches greatimportance to high school students’ cultural acquisition and the cultivation of students’intercultural awareness.“To enhance intercultural understanding and interculturalcommunicative competence”, as one of the main teaching contents and objectives of anordinary high school, has been written into the Ordinary High School English CurriculumStandard (Experiment). Therefore, while teaching English language, teachers should notonly put intercultural concepts, contents and strategies into classroom teaching to improvestudents’ intercultural communicative awareness, but also create real interculturalatmosphere to let them perceive and grasp the differences between Chinese and Westerncultures in customs, values and ways of thinking. However, these requirements only stayon paper in the rural high school, for teachers do not take effective measures to carry themout in their daily teaching activities. So it is essential and significant to develop students’intercultural awareness in rural high schools.Based on the theories of intercultural awareness of Robert Hanvey and other scholars,the present author tries to explore how to cultivate the students’ intercultural awarenessthrough classroom teaching in a rural high school. In order to know the present situation ofthe rural high school students’ intercultural awareness, a questionnaire was conducted atthe very beginning in a three-star rural high school in Suzhou. Then two parallel classes inGrade Two were chosen as subjects. One is the experimental class; the other is the control class. The experiment with culture teaching lasted a period of four months. After that,10students of the experimental class were interviewed in order to find out more about therelationship between their achievements in the final exam and the cultivation of theirintercultural awareness.The results of the questionnaire show that rural high school students’ interculturalawareness is rather low. From the analysis of the pre-test and post-test, we can draw aconclusion that students’ intercultural knowledge and intercultural awareness have beenimproved through culture teaching. Although the average score of the experimental class infinal examination hasn’t been raised, the students have a positive attitude towardsintercultural communication and feel interested and confident to learn English well.Therefore, it is feasible to cultivate intercultural awareness of rural high school students.