English Reading Activities Design In Senior High Schools Based On Cultural Awareness Cultivation

The Ministry of Education promulgated the new edition of English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools in 2017,in which “cultural awareness” is regarded as one of the core qualities of English and the concrete requirements of cultivating students' cultural awareness and ability are proposed,thus giving a clear guidance to English culture teaching in high school.Therefore,in order to achieve the goal of cultivating students' cultural awareness,we need to design various teaching activities to mobilize students' enthusiasm.However,in current high school English reading teaching,many teachers lack ideas and principles for design their teaching,or even pay insufficient attention to the this problem.The present study mainly explores the designing of teaching activities in the English reading teaching in senior high schools to cultivate cultural awareness.This research is conducted in order to answer three questions: Firstly,from what angles should we approach the cultivation of students' cultural awareness through the English reading activities? Secondly,what teaching activities should we design so as to achieve the goals in English reading teaching in senior high schools? Based on the theories of self-regulated learning,cooperative learning,inquiry learning and experiential learning,this study has employed qualitative research and quantitative research,and conducted questionnaires and interviews.The whole research has taken two months with 100 students in two classes of Senior One of a Middle School in Loudi(including 53 boys and 47 girls)for questionnaires and 12 English teachers in the same school for interviewees.Based on the current problems of cultivating students' cultural awareness in English reading teaching in senior high schools from the above two sources,we began to explore the principles and methods.We conclude that: 1)The cultivation of students' cultural awareness should be divided into and carried out through five levels of objectives: understanding,experiencing,investigating,comparing and expanding.2)Teaching activities should be designed in line with those levels of objectives,such as autonomous learning,cooperative learning,inquiry learning and experiential learning so as to cultivate students' cultural awareness in reading English.At the same time,in order to cultivate students' cultural awareness,when designing the teaching activities,we should implement the following five principles: purposefulness,proper sequence,diversity,different levels and periodical.The principles and methods proposed in this study to cultivate cultural awareness can provide useful reference for cultivating cultural awareness in English reading teaching in senior high schools within the framework of the New Curriculum Standards.