An Investigation Into The Intercultural Awareness And Intercultural Communicative Competence Of Chinese High School Students

With the development of linguistic theory and the ever-increasing requirement of intercultural communication,Chinese Educational Committee has made the requirement of cultivating senior high school students' intercultural communicative awareness, cultural sensitivity and essential intercultural communicative competence in the English Curriculum Standards for High School (2001, Experimental Edition). Therefore, the knowledge of language and the training of basic skills should be put into the context of its culture so that students can acquire the cultural communicative competence. But so far, there have not been so many systematic researches on the intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence of senior high school students.This thesis attempts to investigate into the present situation of intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence among Chinese High school students. It examines the correlation among language proficiency, intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence by comparing the mean scores of the three items to discuss whether students'intercultural competence can be improved by improving their intercultural awareness levels. Finally, it offers advice for further studies in intercultural communication in Chinese EFL context.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the background information of the study, the research questions and the main idea of this study.Chapter 2 overviews the related theoretical and empirical studies in intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence. It firstly introduces the relationship between language and culture and its implication for foreign language teaching, then reviews intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence, analyzes their deficiencies respectively and then focuses on defining IA and ICC and their components. Based on the previous study of ICC, the present thesis suggests that IA is a drive as well as a process of development to accommodate cultural differences in promoting an appropriate and effective behavior in intercultural communication. In its most general sense, intercultural communicative competence is the ability and as well as a goal of individuals or organizations to respond effectively by using their knowledge and skills of communication and interactions between different cultures which is a multi-dimensional concept, which consists of the learner's cognitive competence, affective competence and behavioral competence.Chapter 3 is the present research and data analysis, the methodology is given in this part. The researcher has investigated 300 senior high school students in three high schools in Changchun about their intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence. The results of the test show that the current IA and ICC of senior high school students are quite low compared with their language proficiency, there are no significant differences among high school students from different schools in terms of IA and ICC. The results also show that language proficiency has no direct correlation with ICC, but IA and ICC show high correlation.Chapter 4 discussed the implication of the study to high school English teaching and some tentative suggestions including"cultural experience"and lectures of special topics are put forward to improve IA and further improve ICC of high school students.Chapter 5 summarizes the whole study, the significance and limitations of the study as well as suggestions for future research are all provided in this section.