The Integration Of Culture Teaching In Cultivating Secondary Vocational Students’ Intercultural Communication Competence

With the globalization,intercultural communication takes place more frequently.In the situation,secondary vocational students must master English if they want to develop their personal potential to meet their career needs and develop themselves to a higher level in their future employment.Language and culture exist side by side,and culture teaching is needed in language teaching.English teachers in secondary vocational schools must combine language teaching with culture teaching in their teaching to cultivate students’ intercultural communication competence(ICC).This research is conducted with the ideas of intercultural communication theories from some researchers like Hanvey(1979)and Chen Guoming(2009).In the research,culture teaching is put forward and it is assumed to be helpful to develop students’ intercultural communication competence in secondary vocational schools.Students in the Huainan Vocational&Technical College were taken as the research objects;Class 1 is regarded as the experimental class and Class 2 as the control class.The research is designed to solve the research questions(RQ)that come below:RQ1:What effect does the culture teaching on secondary vocational students’ interest and confidence in intercultural communication?RQ2:Can the culture teaching in secondary vocational schools be beneficial to help students improve their awareness in intercultural communication?RQ3:What effect does the culture teaching on secondary vocational students’intercultural communication competence?In order to seek the answers to the questions above,this study has adopted the teaching experiment to find out whether the culture teaching can improve the students’ ICC in secondary vocational schools with the aid of Chen Guoming’s the Intercultural Sensitivity Scale(2009).From this research,it can be concluded that culture teaching is conducive to improving students’ intercultural communication awareness and competence,which provides basis for teaching design in secondary vocational schools.The results suggest the following implications:To begin with,cultural characteristics should be utilized in order to help students improve their language skills;in addition,cultural context integration should be used to help students promote their competence in intercultural communication;and thirdly,make use of audio-visual materials to enrich teaching way.In theory,with the findings of and these suggestions from this research,the study of ICC can be enriched in English teaching for students in secondary vocational schools Practically,these suggestions can help English teachers in vocational schools to design their teaching to make students adapt to their career in the future.