A Comparative Study On Communicative Culture Acquisition Approaches

In the context of globalization, it has been a worldwide trend that different cultures exchange extensively and intercultural communication constitutes the main features of today's society. Therefore, a mere possession of language skills is far from being sufficient for meeting the demand of intercultural communication. It is necessary for the language learners to master culture knowledge through a variety of ways during their learning of linguistic knowledge, in particular the communicative culture knowledge which has a direct impact on communication both in verbal and non-verbal forms.It is because of the significance of communicative culture acquisition in foreign language learning that a great number of related researches have been done by foreign language educators. These researches mainly focus on the status quo of communicative culture teaching and its impact on intercultural communication competence of the foreign language learners. This paper attempts to do a more comprehensive study on the communicative culture acquisition on the basis of previous researches. First, it stresses the necessity of proceeding communicative culture acquisition by analyzing the reasons. Then, the paper sums up the contents of communicative culture acquisition through analyzing the communicative cultural differences between Chinese and Western cultures. Furthermore, it brings forward an autonomous acquisition approach under the guidance of metacognitive strategies after summarizing the traditional way of classroom acquisition. And at last, it analyzes the correlation between communicative culture acquisition and intercultural communication competence development via an empirical research, and compares the roles these two acquisition approaches play on the intercultural communication competence development to indicate the importance of a right selection of acquisition approaches.The empirical research lasts one academic year is carried out in four classes of non-English majors from Grade 2009 in ZWU. Two classes of them adopt classroom teaching method to learn communicative culture, whereas the other two apply the autonomous acquisition approach under the guidance of metacognitive strategies. A questionnaire is used before and after the experiment to test the communicative culture knowledge they grasp and the status of their intercultural communication competence. Then, SPSS 13.0 is employed to analyze the collected data. The results of the study confirm Y.Y.Kim's theory on the relationship of cognitive level and behavioral level, and also demonstrate that intercultural communication competence can be improved by communicative culture acquisition. In addition, compared with the traditional way of classroom acquisition, autonomous acquisition under the guidance of metacognitive strategies is proved to be more effective in promoting the development of intercultural communication competence.The paper finally proposes feasible suggestions for future researches to make in-depth analysis of the factors that affect language learners'intercultural communicative competence, to find more effective ways to learn culture knowledge, and to coordinate the relationship between language, culture and the intercultural communication.