A Study Of The Cultivation Of Cross-Cultural Awareness In Senior-High School English Teaching

Learning a language is learning the related culture.For senior high school students,they are not only learning English but also being exposed to foreign culture critically.With the National English Curriculum Standards'(2017)requirement of cultivating students' cross-cultural awareness,this dissertation aims to illustrate the current situation and the practical and effective teaching strategies adopted to help students to present Chinese traditional culture better in English.Teachers' beliefs of what is considered as culture teaching is collected based on questionnaires.Teachers' perceptions of and students' observation of what is practiced in culture teaching are also collected based on questionnaires.And with the support of interview with teachers and classroom observation,English teachers' practical implementation about culture can be explored.These findings show that both teachers and students have strongly positive attitudes towards the cultivation of students' cross-cultural awareness in China's educational context.But there is a gap between teachers' beliefs and students' perceptions of what is practiced in class by comparing the questionnaire results obtained from the teachers and the students respectively.In particular,based on the observation results,there are some differences between the English teacher in class 9 from Senior 2 level and other English teachers teaching in the same level in terms of the frequency of culture teaching practice and the teaching procedures and methods used for this purpose.Further analyzing the findings shows that the biggest obstacles for English teachers to incorporate cultural contents into daily English teaching are how to get quick access to related and suitable cultural resources and design the effective classroom activities.The findings also demonstrate that English teachers can explain,assimilate,compare and do some practices between Chinese culture and foreign culture to cultivate students' cross-cultural awareness and popularize the essence of Chinese traditional culture.Henceforth,based on the findings,this dissertation further implies that English teachers need more access to related cultural resources and more professional training to improve their teaching skills in designing effective classroom activities to support their culture teaching.Furthermore,decision makers and compilers need to consider the reasonability,suitability and availability of time arrangement and teaching materials for teachers to promote students' cultivation of cross-cultural awareness.