The Cultivation Of Intercultural Communication Competence Of Non-English Majors In EFL Teaching

With the coming of the age of information, the communications in economy and culture between different countries have been more and more frequent, and accordingly intercultural communication has drawn more and more concern of the society. English, as a language of the world, is one of the most widely used languages. Language, communication and culture are so inseparable that one needs high level of intercultural communication competence (ICC) if he hopes to master English. Therefore, at present, it has been extremely crucial for the language teachers to cultivate students'ICC in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching. As non-English majors occupy a big proportion of English learners in China's universities and institutes, it is especially essential to cultivate their ICC.In order to know and grasp Chinese non-English majors'intercultural awareness level, their ICC, and to explore how the teachers are able to cultivate the students'ICC in EFL teaching, the researcher of this thesis has made an investigation based on a great deal of related materials. The subjects of the research include 385 Chinese non-English majors and 4 teachers of different professional titles from different departments of 10 universities and institutes in China respectively. Two instruments have been employed in the form of questionnaire for the non-English majors and in the form of interviews for the teachers in the research. The collected data in the questionnaire have been deeply analyzed with the help of the statistical software SPSS. The result of the research shows that Chinese non-English majors'intercultural awareness is not profound, and their ICC is far from satisfactory. The interviews to the selected teachers show that although they are concerned with students'ICC, and they know the urgency and necessity to cultivate it, yet they are lack of effective methods.Faced with the serious situation of English language teaching, the researcher of this thesis puts forward some effective teaching methods to cultivate non-English majors'ICC. First, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) can be used to emphasize the language functions and make students use target language--English to communicate in various virtual intercultural contexts with the aim of helping students to improve their communicative competence step by step. Second, the method of grasping cultural information from the teaching materials can be used to cultivate the sensitivity to cultural factors and to improve their intercultural awareness. In addition, through building appropriate environment of culture learning, various approaches like role-play, comparison and contrast, audio-visual approaches, and outside-class activities can be used to arouse students'learning interests so as to make them learn cultural knowledge effectively during their participating in these activities, which is beneficial to improve their ICC.