A Comparative Study Of Cultural Awareness Cultivation Activities In English Reading Classes In Senior High Schools

As an indispensable part of senior English teaching,the cultivation of cultural awareness plays an important role in broadening students' horizon,understanding culture and recognizing cultural differences.With the proposal of the core competence of English discipline,there is a new standard for the cultivation of cultural awareness in senior high school English teaching.Correspondingly,teachers are required to enrich cultural awareness training activities and change cultural awareness training methods to adapt to the new standards.Therefore,it is essential to observe and analyze the cultural awareness training activities in senior high school English class.This research objects are five English reading classes in a senior high school in Jining,Shandong Province and five reading classes in the video of the 11 th senior high school English observation contest in 2018.The research methods are case study,classroom observation and interview.Cultural awareness training activities contain: cultural teaching approaches,cultural teaching contents,cultural teaching organization forms and cultural learning activities.The paper aims to answer three research questions: What are the characteristics of cultural awareness training activities in high quality class? What are the characteristics of the cultivation of cultural awareness in normal class? What are the similarities and differences between the cultural awareness training activities in high quality class and normal class? What are the reasons for these similarities and differences?Findings are as follows.First of all,in high-quality class,ways of teaching cultural awareness include cultural contrast,cultural narration,verbal interaction,creating situations,inspiring guidance,intuitive teaching and so on.The teaching content of cultural awareness include historical geography,social conventions,literature and art,emotional attitude,way of thinking,customs,science and technology.Cultural awareness learning activities include listening,watching pictures,watching videos,listening to recordings,role playing and so on.Cultural teaching organization forms include individual activities,peer activities,group activities and collective activities.By comparison,in the normal class,the ways of cultural awareness teaching are not varied,which mainly focuses on teacher-student verbal interaction and elicitation,while the other ways are used less.The teaching content of cultural consciousness only focuses on emotion and attitude,while customs,social conventions,literature and art are not even involved.There are not enough types of cultural awareness learning activities,including verbal interaction,listening and picture reading.The organizational form of cultural awareness teaching only focuses on collective activities.Besides,although there are many differences in the cultivation of cultural awareness between high-quality class and normal class,there are also similarities.In terms of the way of cultural awareness training,both normal class and high-quality class pay more attention to the verbal interaction between teachers and students,while they ignore the way of creating situations to cultivate students' cultural awareness.In terms of teaching content of cultural awareness,both of them attach great importance to the cultivation of students' emotional attitude.In terms of teaching organization of cultural awareness,they pay attention to cultivate students' cultural awareness through collective activities.In terms of the types of cultural awareness learning activities,verbal interaction,picture reading and listening are the most common activities.Moreover,through interviews with five teachers in normal class,it is found that such factors as the needs of the college entrance examination,teachers' personal level,cultural content in teaching materials,school neglect,English learning environment contribute to the ignorance of the cultivation of cultural awareness in normal class.Due to the limitation of research time and practical conditions,there are still some defects in this study,such as failure to interview high-quality teachers and the small number of research objects.Nevertheless,the study presents the characteristics of cultural awareness cultivation in senior high school English teaching,analyzes the similarities and differences between high-quality class and normal class,and puts forward corresponding suggestions for normal class teachers to cultivate students' cultural awareness in English reading class.