Cultivation Strategies for Cultural Awareness in High School English from a Multimodal Perspective

Abstract

The National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools (2017 Edition, 2020 Revised) identifies "cultural awareness" as one of the four dimensions of core competencies in English language teaching, yet its cultivation is hindered by persistent challenges, including one-sided presentation of cultural knowledge, superficial cultural understanding, and insufficient critical thinking skills. To address these challenges, this paper draws on multimodal theory to examine its compatibility with cultural awareness cultivation, proposing three concrete teaching strategies: utilizing film and video resources to reconstruct cultural contexts, interpreting visual metaphors in images, and employing music and body movements to enhance cultural perception. This paper demonstrates that these strategies effectively guide students from rote memorization toward deeper cultural comprehension, affective engagement, and authentic practice by leveraging the synergistic interplay of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic modes. It concludes that multimodal theory not only offers a viable remedy to the limitations of traditional text-based instruction but also provides a practical framework for designing culturally immersive and cognitively engaging classroom experiences, thereby facilitating the effective implementation of cultural awareness cultivation in senior high school English classrooms.