| Over the last two decades, the discussion carried on in TEFL has been concentrated on the dichotomy between grammatical competence vs. communicative competence. However, as the communicative approach in TEFL is gaining increasing popularity and researches on language and culture have been done pervasively, more and more researchers and scholars begin to concern themselves with learners' ICC competence rather than the two mentioned above. Even American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language has added the socio-cultural competence to communicative competence. To sum up, the development of the learner's ICC competence has become the ultimate goal in TEFL.However, for a long time in China, the grammar-oriented perspective has led to the emphasis on the learner's grammatical competence instead of his ICC competence, which results in the inefficiency of TEFL in China. On the other hand, even though it is now commonly accepted that language teaching should focus not only on the forms of language, but also on its social rules and pragmatic rules, the fact is, however, in the process of TEFL, little emphasis has been placed on the development of the learner's intercultural awareness and ICC competence. As a result, although the students have received several years of formal English education and have good grades in school, they frequently remain deficient in the ability to actually use English, and to understand itsappropriate use in normal intercultural communication. In most cases, misunderstandings caused by cultural differences have involved them frequently in intercultural miscommunication. Since the goal of language teaching is to enable students to communicate appropriately and effectively in the target language, improving the students' cross-cultural awareness and developing their ICC competence become essential.Enlightened by the above-mentioned belief that the ultimate goal of TEFL is to develop the learner's ICC competence, the present dissertation endeavors to explore the nature and sources of intercultural miscommunication, and strategies to develop ICC competence from both the learner's perspective and teacher's perspective. It is believed that a systematic study and analysis of intercultural miscommunication and strategies to develop ICC competence will contribute greatly to raising the learners' intercultural awareness and their ICC competence.The dissertation is divided into six chapters.Chapter One is the introduction, which gives a general account of the importance of developing ICC competence, purpose of the dissertation, and the layout of the dissertation.Chapter Two surveys the definitions of culture and examines the relationship between culture and communication, language and culture, and definitions of intercultural communication.Chapter Three deals with the nature and causes of intercultural miscommunication. Intercultural miscommunication refers to the miscommunication between participants from different cultural backgrounds. It occurs when other than the intended message is understood, in other words, when there is a mismatch between the speaker's intention and the hearer's interpretation, that is, when the goal is not achieved. The sources of intercultural miscommunication may fall into five groups: grammatical error, social error, pragmatic failure, which can be further classified into pragmalinguistic failure, socio-pragmatic failure, and pragmabehavioral failure.Chapter Four focuses on defining ICC competence and its components. Based on the previous study of ICC competence, the present dissertation suggests that ICC competence be a multi-dimentional concept, which consists of the learner's language competence, cognitive competence, affective competence, relational competence, strategic competence, operational competence and episodic competence.Chapter Five explores the practical application of learning strategies and teaching strategies to develop the learners' ICC competence. Within this chapter, how everycategory and subcategory of these learning...
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