A Study On The Cultivation Of Intercultural Communicative Awareness In Senior High School English Teaching

In the intercultural communication,different beliefs,values,customs,cognitive behaviors,thinking modes as well as different interpretations of the same thing often result in communicative failure.Therefore,English language teaching should integrate the language knowledge and the target culture so as to cultivate students' intercultural communicative awareness and competence.Meanwhile,both English Curriculum Standards of Senior High School(2017)and core competencies in English course explicitly point out the importance and necessities of cultivating students' cultural awareness in senior high school English teaching.However,due to the impact of exam-oriented education,the study of the target culture knowledge has been long neglected in English teaching,and the exclusive cramming of language knowledge,such as grammar and vocabulary,often fails to meet the requirements of current intercultural settings.Based on such condition,the author is inspired to carry out this study.This study was conducted to explore the current situation of cultivating students' intercultural communicative awareness in senior high school English teaching,and trying to find out the main factors that influence students' level of intercultural communicative awareness.In this study,205 senior high school students from four classes and six English teachers of Grade Two in Yantai No.1 Middle School in Shandong Province are taken as participants.Both quantitative and qualitative research methods are employed in the research,and questionnaire,test,interview as well as class observation serve as research instruments.Before the study,based on the previous studies,the author compiles the questionnaire and test paper aiming to get some first-hand information about the overall situation of the cultivation of senior high school students' intercultural communicative awareness.The data of all the questionnaires and test papers were analyzed by SPSS 19.0 and Excel.According to the collected information,the interview questions were designed,and then interviews were carried out among six English teachers of Grade Two so as to know more about culture teaching in class from the perspective of teachers.With a view to making the research results more convincing,class observation had been conducted for more than one month.The major findings of this study are briefly presented as follows: firstly,the current situation of the cultivation of students' intercultural communicative awareness in senior high school English teaching is far from satisfactory,that is,students' level of ICA is generally low and limited;secondly,the primary factors that affect the cultivation of students' intercultural communicative awareness include the impact of exam-oriented education,the stereotyped,patterned teaching methods,the negative transfer of native culture,the English teachers' limited culture teaching literacy,the absence of authentic English context as well as the neglect of both school and education institutions.On the basis of these factors,a number of pedagogical implications are presented,including improving English teachers' intercultural literacy,strengthening intercultural communication teaching and research,minimizing the impact of negative transfer of L1 culture,increasing testing items on cultural knowledge in examinations and creating language environments for cultural knowledge learning.This study provides certain practical implications for both English teachers and students,which may help promote their intercultural communicative awareness in English teaching and learning.