On Cultivating Students’ Intercultural Awareness in English Reading Teaching at Middle School.doc

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1、毕业论文（设计） On Cultivating Students Intercultural Awareness in English Reading Teaching at Middle School1. Introduction22. The relation between culture teaching and language teaching32.1 Definition of the culture32.2 The nature of language42.3 Relation between culture and language52.4 Current situation

2、 of students intercultural awareness in Chinese middle school62.5 Reasons for the current situation of students intercultural awareness72.5.1 Traditional teaching concepts72.5.2 Time limitation82.5.3 Limited experience92.5.4 Over-confidence93. The importance of culture teaching in English reading te

3、aching103.1 The requirements of modern society103.2 The requirements of modern syllabus and teaching material103.3 The requirements of improving students communication ability113.4 The requirements of improving of English teaching and learning124. The experiment about students intercultural awarenes

4、s in middle school134.1 The questionnaire before the test144.2 Literature Works154.3 Culturally-loaded Words154.4 Communicative culture164.4.1 Addressing.164.4.2Introduction.164.4.3 Compliments and praises.174.4.4 Other different communicative culture174.5 The questionnaire after the test185. Method

5、s of improving cultural awareness in modern reading training185.1 Providing the materials with culture background knowledge195.2 Using audio-visual Approach195.3 Making discussions and comparisons205.4 Paying attention to students psychology216.Conclusion22Appendix23References261. Introduction In Ch

6、ina, there exists a common phenomenon to our English learners, that is, although many students have acquired four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing according to the demand of our traditional syllabus, they often make mistakes in application of language in real life. Even they can make

7、 up grammatically and semantically correct sentences, which are not appropriate or feasible in the daily communication; whats worse, sometimes it will violate cultural principle in the target language community, and thus communicative failure occurs at times. The reason is that modern English teache

8、rs often ignore cultural teaching and spend a lot of time in English language teaching.Researches abroad on language and culture in the past decades are various. In the early 1920s, Malinowski (1923) argues that the study of any language, spoken by a people who live under conditions different from o

9、ur own and possess different culture, must be carried out in conjunction with the study of their culture and of their environment. (Chang Zonglin, 2004: 26) Since 1980s, the research of relation between language and culture has gained more and more attention. The book Culture and Communication (Hu W

10、enzhong, 1994: 6) gives us a systematic introduction of new outcomes about relation between culture and language, the content and method of cultural teaching, etc. In fact, Cultures differ from one another. Each culture is unique. “Learning a foreign language well means more than merely mastering th

11、e pronunciation, grammar, words and idioms. It means learning to see the world as native speakers of that language see it, learning the ways in which their language reflects the ideas, customs and behavior of their society, learning to understand their language of mind. Learning a language is insepa

12、rable from learning its culture.” (耿延宏, 2000)The aims of the paper are to cultivate students culture awareness in English reading teaching, how to improve students interest in English, how to make the student gain the cultural knowledge. 2. The relation between culture teaching and language teaching

13、2.1 Definition of the cultureDefinitions of culture range from broader ones to narrower ones since culture is ubiquitous, multidimensional, complex, and all-pervasive and many definitions have been suggested from different angles. There is a good example of an all-inclusive and descriptive definitio

14、n is the advanced by Kramsch. She offers three definitions: membership in a discourse community that shares a common social space and history, and a common system of standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating and acting; the discourse community itself; the system of standards itself. (1999: 127

15、)Culture is defined as the deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, actions, attitudes, meanings, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and artifacts acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. T

16、herefore, culture can include everything from rites of passage to concepts of the soul. (Tang Degen, 2002: 90)Lustig and koester (1999) pointed out that culture, in a narrower sense, refers to social ideology and its relevant everyday systems and organizations. It includes social ethics and morality

17、, political systems, customs, ethno-psychology, modes of thinking, and habits of everyday interchange. (Chang Zonglin, 2004: 23)2.2 The nature of language Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.(Hu Zhuanglin, 1988: 3) And Professor Deng Yanchang（1989: 63）wrote i

18、n his book Language and Culture: Language is a part of culture and plays a very important role in it. In the broadest sense, language is the symbolic representation of a people, and it comprises their historical and cultural backgrounds as well as their approach to life and their ways of living and

19、thinking. Language, too, provides the social bonding and predictability because humans have rules for language and these rules lead students to communicate more efficiently and effectively. We say this because language can help students understand how to think in a particular culture. In a word, Lan

20、guage is a special social and cultural phenomenon, sanctioned through social life practice over a long time. Each language comes into being and grows in special social and historical environments. Then the language reflects the particular cultural phenomenon of the nation and people in different his

21、tory periods2.3 Relation between culture and language Halliday considers the society as a semantic system, a system of codes and rules. Language is a part of the whole system. The interpretation of the language code system lies in the interpretation of the social and cultural semantic system on whic

22、h the former relies. (Chang Zonglin, 2004: 26)Language is generally accepted words and rules drew from speech and speech is the action and result of human beings speaking. Language is the carrier of culture and culture is the content of language. There is no language without culture content. Social

23、linguistics shows that language is a system of structure rules and culture-specific social behavior roles that humans use to interact with one another. Knowing a language is to know the grammar, vocabulary and discourse patterns and the culture rules of use that together determines how it is appropr

24、iate to use the language in a particular context. So in language teaching, both the language and the culture should be taken into account, otherwise the learner will fail to comprehend the language itself.Different cultures gestate different languages. Chinese Mandarin only exists in the background

25、of Chinese culture. The same is true in other languages. A symbolical-abstract language is the dominant sign of any culture. The language of any group is directly connected to the world view of the group. Culture is a configuration of learned human behavior, results of behavior and principles contro

26、lling behavior that are shared and transmitted by persons in a particular society. When people from different societies interact, it is natural that some cultural differences may exist. The origins of Chinese and western cultural differences may lie, among other factors, in social structure and trad

27、itional education. Society is a basic ground on which a culture originates and develops.The close relationship between language and culture is readily shown by the fact that culture is transmitted from one generation to the next through language. Language learning and cultural learning are not separ

28、able, so the cultural differences should be involved in English learning. 2.4 Current situation of students intercultural awareness in Chinese middle schoolNowadays, even Chinese educators recognize the importance of cultural teaching; most middle school English teachers still follow the traditional

29、 grammar-translation method. Some researches have indicated again and again that there are a lot of problems in the present English teaching method, which results in the high score and low ability in intercultural communication. English teaching in China usually focuses on grammar, translation and l

30、iterary teaching, but the development of students abilities of using language has been neglected. Teachers are still prone to the traditional ways and play a leading role in the class, with their endless and repetitive drills. So the writer can imagine that in the English practice classroom, student

31、s are occupied in taking notes. Even they can get improvement in reading and writing, but not in speaking and listening. Many Chinese students always can get high score in TOFFLE exams, but the truth is that they do not always succeed in communicating with English-speaking people. One of the reasons

32、 is that they do not receive enough intercultural knowledge in their English learning. Therefore, most of students cannot communicate with foreigners effectively. For example, both Chinese and English have many idioms, but in middle school, English teachers seldom introduce this respect. Consequentl

33、y, students usually translate idioms with literal meaning which cause many misunderstandings. In Chinese “dog” is usually used in a derogatory sense such as “走狗”， “狗仗人势”. But in English, it has commendatory sense, e.g. “lucky dog” means “lucky person”, “a Jolly dog” means “a happy man”.The symptom o

34、f deaf and dumb English can even be found in middle school. Most of middle schools teachers always complained that when they put forward an easy question about western manners, the whole class could not answer it. In a word, the present situation of English teaching is that the middle school student

35、s lack of the ability to communicate with foreigner, so the English teachers should take this situation seriously. 2.5 Reasons for the current situation of students intercultural awareness 2.5.1 Traditional teaching conceptsChina is a country that has five-thousand-year civilization. It has a certai

36、n conception of education. In ancient time, students learned for an official position. Nowadays, the college entrance examination seriously affects teachers teaching ideas in most senior middle schools. In order to help students get high score in linguistic proficiency, teachers spend a lot of time

37、to the vocabulary and grammar knowledge in the class. In this case, students have improved their language knowledge, but their intercultural communicative competence has not enhanced. Whats more, some teachers regard cultural teaching as their extra burden. Usually, the students get the knowledge ab

38、out western culture in history class, but not in English class. 2.5.2 Time limitationIn most middle school, one period just has 45 minutes. In order to save time, teachers only teach language knowledge and neglect the cultural introduction in the classroom. Barriers in English learning sometimes com

39、e from the lack of cultural knowledge. Some teachers have attributed their students poor reading and listening comprehension to linguistic deficiencies. They believe that so long as their students grasp the meaning of every word, every sentence, and every text passage, they will have no difficulty i

40、n comprehending the whole text. Teachers have many English lessons to take and have many examinations to correct in a week, so they are too busy and have no opportunity to learn and conduct research. Students have no enough time to learn western culture by themselves. 2.5.3 Limited experienceTeacher

41、s in China are usually considered to have limited experience with the target culture, and in fact few teachers can offer some experience in foreign language classes. Most of them are not qualified to deal with cultural awareness effectively and confidently because they havent enough knowledge. On on

42、e hand, most English teaches are trained in the Chinese environment. On the other hand, they seldom read books on culture teaching theory. Therefore, it is not surprising that they are not capable of dealing with the western culture effectively. Under this circumstance, intercultural awareness culti

43、vation cannot achieve the ideal effect.2.5.4 Over-confidence In modern society, some people still have the opinion that China is one of the four countries with an ancient civilization. We have rich culture and we are not necessary to learn other countries culture. This view causes a prevalent phenom

44、enon in our country that a great number of English teachers tend to be over-confident about their competence and performance, arguing that they already have enough knowledge to teach English. These kinds of reasons make them neglect their development. The intercultural knowledge of English teachers

45、cannot nearly meet the requirements of modern English teaching. We really have a very long way to go. 3. The importance of culture teaching in English reading teaching 3.1 The requirements of modern societySince 2001, China has become a formal member of WTO and plays an important role in the world n

46、ew economic arena. International contacts have become more and more frequent and many people go abroad to get a better job or get further education. In order to improve our daily life, we cannot simply by consuming all that we produce. Today, more and more foreign companies and international investo

47、rs do business in China. The Chinese now find themselves competing for business amid a throng of new competitors from different countries we must understand their cultures, and with which we must communicate effectively if we hope to be successful in this new world economy. The modern conditions of

48、China require the English learners should have a good command of knowledge and are able to communicate with people from different countries.3.2 The requirements of modern syllabus and teaching materialThe new English Curriculum Standard for Middle School shows that students of Middle School should n

49、ot only grasp English vocabularies, grammar, and its pronunciation, but also properly grasp the relationship between language learning and culture understanding. The newly organized teaching materials of junior and senior middle school involve some western cultures, for example, greeting, western festivals, literature, music, body language and so on. Then culture becomes an important part of