An Investigative Research On The Cultivation Of Cultural Awareness In ELT In Junior Middle School

With the rapid development of globalization,the communication between countries and people is becoming more and more frequent,while cultural collisions between countries have become increasingly fierce,which has a great impact on our traditional foreign language teaching(esp.English teaching).As a result,the word usage teaching in class has been unable to meet the demands of the society for current junior middle school students.In the new curriculum requirements,the cultivation of cultural awareness,language knowledge and language skills have been put in the same important position.This leads the teachers to follow the new curriculum requirements,study the new teaching materials full of relevant cultural knowledge,and use the reasonable and effective teaching methods to infiltrate cultural knowledge into the daily English teaching activities in English teaching in junior middle school,so that the students can not only perceive and understand the cultural differences between Chinese and western customs,values and ways of thinking,but also improve their language communication competence.Actually,the new curriculum requirement for cultivation of cultural awareness has not really been implemented into the daily teaching activities in rural junior middle schools.Cultivating students' cultural awareness is particularly necessary in rural junior middle schools in some ways.Based on the theories of cultural awareness of Tylor and other scholars,and combined with the actual situation of junior middle school English teaching,the present author tries to explore how to cultivate the students' cultural awareness through classroom teaching in the rural junior middle school.Researcher conducted two questionnaires at the very beginnig in Lingkou Middle School in Danyang to get the general idea of the situation of the teaching in this rural junior middle school.Then two parallel classes in Grade Two were chosen as subjects: one is the experimental class;the other is the control class.During the term,an experiment on the integration of language and culture teaching lasted for a period of four months.In addition,an interview was conducted in the two English teacherswho are interested in this study.After that,8 students who made a great progress in the final examination of the experimental class were interviewed in order to find out more about the relationship between their achievements in the final examination and the cultivation of their cultural awareness,so as to understand how the students evaluate the new teaching mode.The results of the questionnaire show that the cultural awareness of the students and teachers in the rural junior middle school is rather low.The experimental results show that the integration of language and culture teaching has little effect in improving the students' test scores in a short term.However,after a long time,it can not only improve the students' test scores,but also make the students' cultural awareness better,which has been good for changing their attitude towards English learning,and for increasing their interest in English learning,so that the students have enough confidence to take part in the activities of daily communication.Therefore,it is feasible to cultivate the cultural awareness of rural junior middle school students.