An Empirical Study Of Middle School English Reading Teaching Based On The Cultivation Of Cross-cultural Competence

In the context of globalization,strengthening the cultivation of citizens' intercultural competence has been paid much attention in the world.Intercultural competence refers to a person's ability to communicate effectively and appropriately in a intercultural context based on his own intercultural knowledge,attitudes and skills.According to The High School English Curriculum Standards(2017),English teaching is required to cultivate students' intercultural competence,which is crucial for middle school students.English reading is one of the important approaches to achieve the goal,therefore reading teaching is worthy of being studied.On the basis of the Scaffolding Theory,the principles of intercultural teaching,and the theoretic structure of intercultural competence,this study attempts to solve two problems using quantitative and qualitative research methods:(1)what is the current situation of intercultural competence among middle school students? What are the existing problems?(2)What is the effect of English reading teaching on the intercultural competence of middle school students? Firstly,through a questionnaire survey participated by 115 senior high school students and interviews with seven English teachers from a local middle school in Huimin County,Shandong Province,the author tried to investigate the status quo and existing problems of intercultural competence among middle school students.Secondly,the author constructed a reading teaching model based on intercultural competence development,applied this model to conduct an 18-week teaching experiment,and evaluate the teaching results by test papers and interviews.The findings show:(1)the current situation and problems of intercultural competence of middle school students are: students' overall intercultural competence is not ideal,which is manifested in the following aspects:(1)Students have unbalanced development of intercultural knowledge,which is shown on their lack of foreign cultural knowledge and vocabulary of idioms.(2)Although students have a positive intercultural attitude,nearly 40% of whom lack initiative in learning.(3)Students have good intercultural qualities,however they don't have a deep understanding of Chinese traditional cultural knowledge and their values.(4)The overall level of students' intercultural skills is insufficient.Analyzing,contrasting and discovering skills need to be improved.(2)English reading teaching has effectively promoted the development of middle-school students' intercultural competence,especially on the cultural knowledge of both their own countries and other countries';in terms of intercultural attitudes,they have developed their learning initiative;their contrasting and analyzing skills have been improved to some extent;as for their intercultural qualities,they have further enhanced their moral values and cultural confidence.However,the students have not made significant progress in acquiring vocabulary knowledge such as idioms,and their intercultural skills are not good enough.Students' intercultural competence needs to get further improved.This study shows that English reading teaching has a good effect on developing middle-school students' intercultural competence.The findings of the study are expected to provide reference for the middle-school intercultural competence development and English teaching reforms.