A Study Of Current Intercultural Communicative Awareness Of Senior High School Students

The rapid development of globalization of economy and Internet leads the increasing communication among countries.Intercultural communication becomes a part of people's life.The communication among different cultures and societies has become unavoidable.When people are benefiting from globalization and high technologies,they are also suffering from communicative failures,contradictions and conflicts caused by cultural differences.Globalization is not equal to mono-culture.We cannot treat all kinds of problems occurred in intercultural communication with old cultural views and ways of thinking.Therefore,developing sensitivity to cultural differences,shortening the distance between cultures,improving intercultural communicative awareness and developing intercultural communicative competence have become the urgent requirements of the new era.Language is the major tool of intercultural communication and is also the carrier of culture.Culture has impacts on language in vocabulary,pronunciation,grammar and discourse structure.So,culture and language are closely related.In English class,besides linguistic knowledge,teacher should also explain cultural knowledge to improve students' intercultural communicative awareness and ability.Theobjects of this study are 331 students of Grade One who come from six different classes of three differentsenior high schools.The study focuses on senior high school students' current intercultural communicative awareness and tries to find the reasons for it.This paper uses WPS and Excel to analyse the reasons that prevent students from improving their intercultural awareness.This paper also interviews 30 students and 10 teachers of Grade One.The results of questionnaire and interview show that senior high school students' intercultural awareness is very weak.What's more,their cultural knowledge and cultural understanding ability remain to be improved.Major reasons include students' lack of cultural knowledge,the influence of ethnocentrism,the influence of negative transfer of mother tongue and teachers' lack of ability.Based on the above reasons,this paper gives a few suggestions.First,teachers should improve their cultural ability and overall qualities.Second,they must establish correct teaching views and balance the relationship between cultural teaching and language teaching in class.Third,students should set up positive attitude toward English and exotic culture.Besides,students must accumulate cultural knowledge about English initiatively to improve their intercultural awareness.The improvement of cultural awareness is not achieved overnight.It needs the support and cooperation of state,society,and school.Through questionnaire,it is found that in Huaibei city the intercultural communicative awareness of senior high school students is insufficient.Based on the current situation and the reasons,this paper proposes some feasible advice from the perspectives of teacher and student.It is expected that these suggestions will be helpful to enhance high school students' intercultural awareness in Huaibei city.