A Study Of The Intercultural Sensitivity And Its Relationship With The Culturally Loaded Vocabulary In SLA Among High School Students

Intercultural sensitivity refers to the individual's active desire to motivate themselves to understand,appreciate and accept cultural differences or to discriminate and experience related cultural differences.Culturally loaded vocabulary refers to those words that are tinged with specific cultural meanings.In second language acquisition,it is important to acquire the language with taking the culture factors into consideration.Language learning is not a complete process without learning and understanding culture.In this way,the cultural knowledge and language must be combined to achieve an effective and efficient language learning.As we know,culturally loaded vocabulary is the vocabulary loaded with cultural meaning and most of cultural knowledge is presented through the use of culture-loaded words.Many researchers and scholars have done a number of studies on both intercultural sensitivity and culturally loaded vocabulary in different fields from different aspects.The research participants have covered different education levels including undergraduates of English majors and non-English majors,graduates of English majors and non-English majors,oversea students,and teachers from universities.But there is few research on how intercultural sensitivity affects the culturally loaded vocabulary among high school students.Thus,the author pays closer attentions to figure out the relationship between intercultural sensitivity and culturally loaded vocabulary during the language learning among high school students.This study was conducted among high school students in a key middle school in Nanchang,JiangXi Province,with 168 high school students in total.The Intercultural Sensitivity Scale is used to assess intercultural sensitivity while the culturally loaded vocabulary test is to assess high school students' knowledge of culture-loaded words.Besides,SPSS is applied to collect and analyze the data.The aims of the study is to figure out the following three questions:1.What is the status quo of intercultural sensitivity and the culturally loaded vocabulary among students in high school?2.Is intercultural sensitivity correlated with the learning of culturally loaded vocabulary?If yes,to what extent?3.To what extent do the five dimensions of intercultural sensitivity contribute to the prediction of the culturally loaded vocabulary?From the results of two tests,conclusions can be drawn as follows:firstly,the minimum score,the maximum score and the standard deviation of intercultural sensitivity test are 40,116 and 10.122.Besides,the mean score is 86.68,which is exceed the medium level(72 points).It shows that the high school students in this key middle school hold a relatively positive attitude towards intercultural communication and demonstrate a positive trend on intercultural sensitivity.Secondly,the minimum score,the maximum score and the standard deviation of culturally loaded vocabulary test are 18,68 and 9.936 respectively,showing that there is a big difference among high school students on the acquisition of culturally loaded vocabulary.With the mean score is 39.05,which is far below the passing line 60,it shows that the knowledge of culture-loaded words among high school students in this middle school is not adequate.Lastly,the correlation between intercultural sensitivity and the culturally loaded vocabulary is significant at the 0.05 level,and the correlation coefficient is 0.184.It means that the intercultural sensitivity is significantly correlated with the culturally loaded vocabulary.The more sensitive students are to the different culture,the larger their knowledge of the culture-loaded words.Further,among five dimensions of intercultural sensitivity,respect for cultural difference predicts positively towards the culturally loaded vocabulary.Based on the findings,some pedagogical suggestions are presented in this study:both teachers and students should be aware of the importance of learning culturally loaded vocabulary and try to build a bridge between culture and language learning.Lastly,some limitations of this study and suggestions for future study are presented.