An Investigation On The Current Situation Of The Cultivation Of Students’ Cultural Awareness In Junior High School English Teaching ——Taking H Junior High School In Changchun City As An Example

The 2011 edition of English Curriculum Standard for Compulsory Education clearly points out that the general goal of English curriculum is“ to enable students to form a preliminary comprehensive language ability through English learning,promote mental development and improve comprehensive humanistic literacy.” Among them,cultural awareness,as an aspect of comprehensive language ability,is conducive to the correct understanding of language and the proper use of language.The cultivation of students’ cultural awareness will help students to understand foreign culture,deepen their understanding of the culture of the motherland,expand their cultural horizons and form cross-culturalcommunication awareness and preliminary cross-cultural communication ability.The purpose of this study is to understand the current situation of the cultivation of English cultural awareness in junior high schools.The specific research questions are as follows:1.What is the current situation of the cultivation of students’ cultural awareness in junior high school English teaching?2.What are the main causes of this current situation?Based on the theory of the relationship between language and culture and the theory of intercultural communication,this study took 40 English teachers and 805 students from Grade one to Grade three of H Middle School in Changchun as the research subjects,and adopted classroom observation method,questionnaire survey method and interview method.First of all,30 English classes（1350 minutes in total）of 6 English teachers were observed in order to investigate the current situation of teachers’ cultivation of students’ cultural awareness in classroom teaching.After the classroom observation,the questionnaire was issued to 805 students to further understand the effect of cultural awareness cultivation.Finally,in order to analyze the reasons for the current situation of cultivating students’ cultural awareness,the author issued questionnaires to 40 teachers and selected 6 teachers for interviews.The study draws the following conclusions: 1.English teaching in junior middle school is not enough to cultivate students’ cultural awareness.It is embodied in the teachers’ insufficient attention to the cultivation of cultural awareness;The cultivation of cultural awareness focuses more on cultural knowledge and understanding than intercultural communication awareness and ability;The teaching resources of cultural awareness cultivation are relatively single,and in most cases,teachers are only limited to teaching the content from textbooks.The teaching methods are not flexible and diverse,and teachers still explain alone when cultivating cultural awarenesswith low participation of students.2.The main reasons for this situation are as follows: teachers lack their own cultural awareness and ability to cultivate cultural awareness.in addition,they do not fully understand the meaning of cultural awareness in the core competencies;they do not pay enough attention to the cultivation of students’ cultural awareness,and the pressure of examination also affects the cultivation of students’ cultural awareness.