Cultivating Of Students' Intercultural Communicative Competence In English Language Teaching

With the rapid development of technology and society, the world is making for development of globalization and this trend also makes the world become a global village. The frequent communications of people all over the world enhance people'global awareness, meanwhile, foreign languages are used more and more widely. All of this makes intercultural communication become the distinguished features in our times. People from different cultural backgrounds can not avoid problems of cultural discrepancy. As English is the most widely used language, it is essential for people to know western culture so as to communicate successfully. Therefore, more attention should be paid to cultivation of intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence during English language teaching.New English curriculum standard for the senior high school put forward cultural awareness, cultural understanding and intercultural communicative competence have been one of goals of English basic education. In response to this situation, it is imperative to develop and improve students'intercultural communicative competence, however, first of all, it is necessary to know students'practical level and situation of intercultural communicative competence. What is the situation of students'intercultural communicative competence in senior high school? The author made questionnaires and a test to investigate the English intercultural communicative competence for 120 students and 15 teachers in No. 6 Middle School in Harbin and found that students'intercultural communicative competence is generally low and the reasons for this phenomenon: lack of knowledge about western culture; influence of ethnocentrism; influence of mother tongue negative transfer. The result of the questionnaire showed that students lack of awareness of cultural difference and have low cultural sensitivity to cultural difference; English teacher's understanding of cross-cultural communication needs to be improved; college entrance exam still remains as a baton in senior high school English education, and there is less cultural knowledge about English-speaking countries in college entrance exam, thus teachers and students only focus on teaching and learning of English language knowledge, but teaching and learning of knowledge about western culture are ignored.Based on the empirical study in this thesis, author put forward strategies of cultivating and improving intercultural communicative competence of senior high school students: increasing teachers'intercultural teaching competence, intercultural teaching principles, some teaching methods and suggestions that can be implemented.