Cultivation Of Intercultural Communicative Competence Under The Model Of Affection, Cognition And Behavior

With the acceleration of globalization, communication and exchange among countries have tremendously increased in recent years. People have more opportunities to communicate with foreigners face-to-face. The college English learners often have encountered with barriers, sometimes, pragmatic mistakes in intercultural communication. It can be attributed to the following reasons:insufficient cultural background knowledge of the target language; not to adapt to their own verbal behavior according to the communication styles or the needs of the interlocutors from different cultural groups; and lack of cultural relativism and cultural awareness. All in all, the communicative barriers have resulted from being short of intercultural communicative competence, which indicates that cultivation of intercultural communicative competence is necessary and urgent for college students. By reviewing literature, the author finds out that it is mainly concerned with English majors'college students, while the research on non-English majors'college students is rare. Besides, systematic teaching methods have not been adopted in culture teaching in the previous research. In this thesis, culture teaching is conducted based on a systematic teaching method---task-based language teaching under the model of affection, cognition and behavior for the purpose of cultivating non-English majors'college students'intercultural communicative competence.The present research centers on the following questions:firstly, is it possible to conduct culture teaching based on task-based language teaching under the model of affection, cognition and behavior proposed by Zhang Hongling (2007); secondly, is the culture teaching based on task-based language teaching an effective way of cultivating the students' intercultural communicative competence; finally, will the culture teaching based on task-based language teaching affect the students'English language proficiency.This thesis first defines the content of culture teaching with reference to the researches done by the scholars at home and abroad. Model of intercultural communicative competence put forward by Zhang Hongling (2007) is adopted, which is formed based on the model proposed by Byram (1977). Zhang (2007)'s intercultural communicative competence model consists of three levels:affection, cognition and behavior. Intercultural attitudes, intercultural knowledge, and intercultural behavior are the correspondent components. The author has conducted one semester's culture teaching experiment in one college English class (54 students) in Polytechnic Institute of Taiyuan University of Technology from three levels:the cultivation of intercultural attitudes, the teaching of intercultural knowledge, and the development of intercultural skills. The research has adopted the quantitative analysis and the qualitative analysis. The students'intercultural communicative competence has been tested before and after the culture teaching experiment in order to learn about the changes of the participants'intercultural communicative competence. Intercultural communicative competence test papers are based on "Culture Test Model" put forward by Valette (1977) and "Socio-cultural Test" proposed by Wang Zhenya (2005). Besides, an interview is conducted after the culture teaching experiment in order to learn about the participants'detailed opinions about task-based language teaching in culture teaching and the integration of culture teaching into language teaching. What's more, the participants'final examination scores before and after the culture teaching experiment have been adopted in this research.The experimental results indicate that:firstly, it is feasible and easy to implement culture teaching based on task-based language teaching in college English classroom under the model of intercultural communicative competence proposed by Zhang Hongling (2007); secondly, culture teaching based on task-based language teaching is, to some extent, helpful for the cultivation of non-English majors'college students'intercultural communicative competence. After the culture teaching experiment, their intercultural communicative competence has changed slightly. To be specific, their intercultural attitudes have been improved slightly and they have acquired more intercultural knowledge, while their intercultural skills have not changed significantly due to the duration and coverage of the culture teaching experiment are not enough; finally, culture teaching experiment based on task-based language teaching has played a positive role in the improvement of the college students'English language proficiency.At last, the author has proposed a few suggestions in culture teaching according to the major findings in this research. However, due to limited time, space and the author's capability, there still exist a few limitations of the present research, which needs to be improved in the follow-up research.