An Investigation And Study On Communicative Strategies In Intercultural Communication

Intercultural communication plays an important role in second language learning. The purpose of instruction in intercultural communication is to arm the English learners with intercultural communicative competence. A necessary solution is to improve the learners' strategic competence which is an indispensible component of ICC. In other words, it is essential to assist the learners with communicative strategies (CSs) to improve their strategic competence for the final aim of improving their ICC. This dissertation makes a comprehensive analysis of CSs by discussing its definition, typology and main components. A further investigation is conducted to examine English majors'attitudes towards CSs and the frequency of using them in communication and the factors that affect the students'employment of communicative strategies. Results show that students seldom employ communicative strategies. They hold a positive attitude towards the achievement strategies and a negative attitude to the reduction strategies in communication, but the real employment of these strategies in communication is opposite to their perceptions. That is to say they are against the reduction strategies, but they frequently employ them in communication. They are for achievement strategies, but they seldom use it. And the factors that affect students'choices of communicative strategies are also examined in this investigation. Those factors include internal factors, such as language proficiency and cultural background, and external factors, such as learning context and language distance. Based on the results obtained from the investigation, it is concluded that it was possible and necessary to teach communicative strategies in class. Accordingly, the writer puts forward some suggestions on how to improve learners'ability to use communication strategies. It is hoped that language teachers will gain great insights from the result of the investigation, help students with good mastery of communicative strategies, and ultimately with great improvement in intercultural communicative competence.