On Cultivation Of Intercultural Communicative Competence From The American5Cs Standards

The United States of America, as a superpower country, is a multilingual andmulticultural nation. There are so many nations and races in the country that variousforeign languages are widely used. For a long time, foreign language education inAmerica is in poor condition. Though the students have studied a foreign language forseveral years and obtained high grades in examinations, they are unable to speak thelanguage at all. In order to help improve the students’ language competence and meetthe demand of rapid development of the globalization of economy and politics, theAmerican Department of Education and the American Council of the Teaching ofForeign Languages, through unremitting efforts, designed and published Standards forForeign Language Learning in the21st Century. This document focuses on five goalsin foreign language education: Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisonsand Communities. In the standards, communication and cultures are at the heart of thehuman experience. Great importance has been attached to instructing students who areequipped culturally and linguistically to communicate successfully. In foreignlanguage teaching, students should be given abundant opportunities to usecommunicative strategies, learning strategies, as well as the appropriate elements ofthe language system and culture. They should also be given opportunities to developtheir critical thinking skills, and encouraged to use modern technology to learnlanguages. After years of effort, foreign language education in America has madegreat strides.Because of the rapid development of science and technology and theglobalization of economy, our country is in desperate need of people who are familiarwith foreign cultures and capable of communicating accurately and appropriately inintercultural situations. Even though intercultural studies have been introduced intoChina for more than twenty years and it is now commonly accepted that languageteaching should focus not only on language skills, but also on its pragmatic and socialrules. However, in the process of teaching, little emphasis has been placed on thedevelopment of learners’ intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence (ICC).This thesis is intended to afford us lessons that merit attention for cultivatingintercultural communicative competence of the students through the research on5Csstandards.