A Study Of The Effect Of Cultivation Of Cultural Awareness On The Reading Competence Of High School Students

Reading comprehension is a huge challenge for senior high students as it is increasingly hard to handle in the Colleage Entrance Examination.Moreover,reading also plays a significant part in students' lifetime to gain information and get to know the world.In 2003,the new English curriculum criteria for high schools emphasized the importance to the cultivate students' reading ability.Nowadays,high school English teachers still tend to force students to do lots of reading exercises,translating the sentences in the reading passages when doing reading teaching.Vocabulary and grammar are what they think decide students'reading competence,with cultural awareness ignored.But being a cognitive ability,reading is a process in which both verbal and non-verbal elements work together.The existing cultural background in the brain benefits a lot when students try to predict in reading process.Accoding to the author's investigation,high school English teachers have realized the importance of cultivation of cultural awareness,but cultural teaching is rarely to be seen in today's English class.The major reason is that teachers suspect the effect of cultivation of cultural awareness on students' reading competence and grades.The author designed a teaching experiment with the No.1 Senior High School of Xiaogan in Hubei Province as an Example.An experimental class was selected with another class served as control.The other independent variables controled,the cultivation of cultural awareness became the only independent variable in this experiment,to observe the differences of the dependent variables(students' interest in English study,reading competence,and English grades).Before the teaching experiment,the author summarized the main cultural factors influencing students' English reading by the interview and questionnaire survey for teachers and students,which inspired the author about the in-class and out-class teaching methods of the cultivation of cultural awareness and also helped the author to design the proper activities for students.According to the feedback from the teacher and the result of the interview for students,it can be concluded that the cultivation of cultural awareness can help to improve students' interest in English study.After collecting the resluts of two tests,the author analyzed the data of the rate of students according to their grades of reading comprehension and the whole test.Results compared,it can be concluded that the cultivation of cultural awareness has a great effect on the improvement of students reading competence and English grades.The essay analyzes the effect of the cultivation of cultural awareness on high school students,offering some advice on how to improve the methods of cultural teaching.The essay aims to verify the effect of the cultivation of cultural awareness,to appeal to high school English teachers doing more cutural teaching and improving the teaching method of the cultivation of cultural awareness,in order to improve students' reading competence,English grades,and students' attitude to English study,helping students to widening their horizon,forming the universal consciousness and correct view of the world.