Intercultural Communicative Competence Acquisition In ELT Under Chinese Context

During the span of the past decade, acquiring intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in ELT under Chinese context draws many educators, linguists even language teachers' attention, and yet, arouses the concerned experts and scholars' interests. It seems verbose to mention the interwoven and interactive relationship between culture and language, culture to language teaching. Anyhow, there are still many misconceptions on the above-focused issue which need further clarification & interpretation. Hence, Chapter I emphasizes that the ICC acquisition is context-specific. After looking back the history of culture in foreign language teaching (FLT), this section redefines the culture in FLT. And then, the four premises and their marked characteristics of ICC will be introduced in the following part.Chapter II attaches great importance to the objective of ICC and its theoretical foundation. The principal purpose of this ICC conception is to co'nstruct a world view -the worldwide notion as the outcome of globalization. Whilst the formation of a world view is about to be interpreted by means of the socialization theory, moreover, the socio-cognitive and stereotyping theory will be adopted respectively. The principles and guidelines of acquiring ICC in ELT are to be yielded as a result of the above theoretical foundation.Chapter III is the key and foremost section of the whole thesis. It is the right section to discuss the issue from a specific perspective, i.e. acquiring ICC in ELT under Chinese context, which echoes or is in line with the theoretical or general information mentioned above. Due to the systematic and comprehensive character of this field, the detailed discussions will be dwelt upon five discrete portions, viz. promoting ICC in ELT, culture teaching tasks, language teachers' roles in ELT, culture teaching approaches and culture teaching effect. The section on culture teaching approaches is the ad hoc section of this chapter. Researches on two influential culture teaching approaches in China, namely, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and STAD CL (Student Teams-Achievement Divisions Cooperative Learning) will be performed via two sets of questionnaires to each teaching approach. As to the data collected from thequestionnaires, the evaluative-analytical and qualitative-quantitative methods are to be employed for description, analysis and interpretation.Chapter IV is the composition -of findings of the above chapter and summary of the whole thesis. In light of the results of the researches and investigations, tentative suggestions will be put forward for the purpose of being used as a reference from four respects: culture learning materials, culture teaching approaches, language teachers' tasks in ELT, and a new curriculum with the integration of culture as well. And then, summery and conclusion of the whole thesis will be drawn in the latter part of this chapter.