Strategies Of Cultivating Students' Intercultural Awareness In English Teaching Of Junior Middle School

With the development of the era,international communication has become more and more frequent,and more graduates who can well adapt to intercultural communications are needed greatly.However,many Chinese students who have learned English more than ten years and mastered a lot of vocabulary and grammatical knowledge still cannot communicate in English appropriately.In addition,cultural awareness,which consists of cultural knowledge,cultural understanding,intercultural awareness and communicative competence,has been clearly listed as one of the teaching aims in National English Curricular Standards for Compulsory Education.Therefore,students' intercultural awareness cultivation in junior English teaching cannot be ignored.This study,taking Y Junior Middle School as an example,investigates the current situation of students' intercultural awareness cultivation in English teaching by the instruments of cultural test,questionnaire and interview.The results of the investigation indicate that classroom teaching is vital for cultivating students' intercultural awareness and teachers should play an important role in this process.This thesis consists of six parts.Part One is the general introduction to the background,significance and purpose of the study.Part Two gives the definition of intercultural awareness and reviews the previous studies on culture teaching abroad and at home.Part Three introduces theoretical basis of this study,including Theory of Intercultural Communication and Transfer Theory.Part Four investigates the current situation of students' intercultural awareness cultivation and finds that: Firstly,classroom teaching and textbooks are the main sources of obtaining cultural background knowledge for students and they perform better on cultural knowledge in the textbooks than that from other sources,especially culturally-loaded words,social customs,values and nonverbal communication and what's more,students' intercultural awareness is not satisfying.Secondly,although many English teachers hold positive attitudes towardstudents' intercultural awareness cultivation,they pay less attention to cultural background knowledge in teaching for many reasons,namely,pressure of entrance exams for senior high school and the limited classroom teaching time.Part Five takes the textbook--English(published by Hebei Education Press)as an example and demonstrates some teaching samples to show that teachers should make full use of the textbooks,adopt flexible and diversified teaching methods and penetrate cultural background knowledge into classroom teaching.Moreover,English teachers are supposed to further understand the significance of students' intercultural awareness cultivation and improve their own cultural qualities as well.In addition,teachers should encourage students to absorb more cultural information from all possible ways after class.Part Six summaries the major findings and puts forward some suggestions for the school authorities and students as well as the limitations of this study.