摘要
Since the turn of the century, higher education policy in China has highlighted the importance of cultivating students＇ intercultural competences, particularly in the context of English language teaching. In spite of this, studies show that to this day Chinese ELT classrooms in higher education have rarely taken a cultural turn and teachers＇ understanding of interculturalism remains insufficient. This paper reports an action research study on how intercultural awareness was developed in the context of an English reading course at an independent college of a major Chinese university. The study followed a teaching flow that integrates intercultural learning with critical thinking by challenging students to select, analyze, and raise questions about English texts on aspects of Chinese culture. Mapping the outputs of a cohort of 77 second-year undergraduate students onto Baker＇s （2012; 2015） model of intercultural awareness, the study shows that a majority of participants demonstrated a level beyond basic awareness. The paper concludes that reading courses can be used to help foster intercultural awareness among Chinese students, and it offers some pedagogical and theoretical reflections on integrating intercultural learning with ELT, and formulates a number of suggestions for further studies.
二十一世纪以来,中国高等教育政策更加强调培养学生的跨文化能力,尤其是在英语教学领域。但研究显示,迄今中国高校英语教学能将两者结合的并不多见。本文展示了一个独立学院的跨文化教学行动研究。两位作者设计了一个融合跨文化学习和英语阅读为一体的"教学流",用它去引导学生筛选、分析一些关于中国文化现象的英文阅读材料,并针对材料开展一系列练习。然后他们用贝克跨文化意识模表(2012;2015)对77位英语专业本科二年级学生的相关数据进行了对照和评估。分析结果显示,大多数同学都超越了"基本文化意识"层面。本文试图说明,英语阅读课程可以用来促进对中国学生跨文化意识的培养,同时也给出了一些建议。
