The Survey On Mongolian Junior High School Students’ Intercultural Knowledge In English Learning

English teaching is not only the simple process of language teaching,but also the process of understanding English culture.Therefore,it is significant for students to master the cultural knowledge for improving their intercultural communicative competence.With the emergence of new curriculum standards,cultural awareness has become one of the five major goals.So educators should pay attention to the transfer of cultural knowledge in their teaching.The previous studies have mainly focused on intercultural knowledge of Han students,and their research subjects were English majors and senior high school students.However,few researches have been conducted on the intercultural knowledge of Mongolian junior high school students.The subjects of this research are 103 Mongolian junior students from Kulun No.4 Junior High School.The author carried out the intercultural knowledge tests and intercultural sensitivity questionnaire survey,and interviewed four Mongolian junior teachers.This paper aims at answering the following three research questions:(1)What are Mongolian junior high school students’ intercultural sensitivity in intercultural knowledge learning?(2)What are the current situations of Mongolian junior high school students’ intercultural knowledge?(3)What are the factors affecting the learning ofintercultural knowledge of Mongolian junior school students? The data from the tests were analyzed by SPSS 17.0.The results show that: firstly,the Mongolian junior high school students have a great sense of identity towards intercultural knowledge.They respect the cultural differences,but Mongolian junior high school students lack of confidence and have low participation desire in intercultural communication;secondly,the overall situation of Mongolian junior high school students’ intercultural knowledge is unbalanced.They have a good understanding of their own cultural knowledge.But they have little understanding of Chinese cultural knowledge and English cultural knowledge.Especially,the mastery of English cultural knowledge needs to be improved;thirdly,from the results of the teacher’s interview,teaching materials involved very little cultural knowledge.There is no sufficient time for English teachers to teach Mongolian and English cultural knowledge because of the heavy burden of teaching.These are the two main reasons that Mongolian junior school students rarely master the intercultural knowledge.