Developing Intercultural Strategic Competence In Oral English Teaching

After the announcement of Beijing being the host city of the 2008 Olympic Games, in China, we have set off a new upsurge of learning English. Around the whole country, no matter the old or the young, they are all preparing for the coming international event. However global interdependence and cultural diversity raise an inescapable question: how to achieve success in international communication? It draws our attention. In communication, there is no one who knows everything about a language. It can be observed that the most popular way to develop learners' intercultural communicative competence today is to explain and introduce the target language and culture. Foreign language learning involves not only the acquisition of language-related knowledge, but also the development of language-related abilities. In many cases, the communication is carried out between one non-native speaker of English and another, and sometimes, native speakers' norms are not the only acceptable ones for use in many contexts where English is spoken. Consequently, a learner of English is liable to lose his usual form in a real encounter with his counterpart in the communication practice. To solve these problems, a learner, has to use some communicative strategies. Furthermore, even innative and native speakers' interaction, there may raise misunderstandings that require the application of communication strategies. Because not all the native speakers are ideal communicators, they also need to be equipped with communicative strategies in the hope of developing their own international communicative competence.With the discussion of some current foreign language teaching, we found that most of our syllabuses are designed to prevent learners from running into problems. They remove problems in advance by explaining difficult words, providing grammatical points, and giving glossaries. Although we have done some development, such as Audiolingual Approach reduces the amount of teacher-talk in class in order to increase learners' talking time. But this extra quantity of language practice usually took the form of highly controlled drilling, and that did not solve all the problems. The profession moved on from ''getting them talking to each other" to the more complex problems of "getting them communicating", and the result was what we call the Communicative Approach to language teaching. The communication practice in the classroom is pedagogically useful because it represents a necessary and productive stage in the transfer off classroom learning to the outside world. Following Savignon (1972), it is easy to see that we should not expect our learners to be able to use their classroom learning outside the classroom if they have never really had much opportunity to practice in circumstances at all similar to "real life". In short, all too often the learner has to make too big a leap from classroom drill to genuine communication. Giving the learners practice activities designed to - simulate "real life" communication problems was the obvious way to bridge that gap. Based on it, the present dissertation proposes a more feasible and economical way to develop learners' competence in real life communication—intercultural communication. Communicators' intercultural competence can be developed by building up their strategic competence. It means that develop their ability to use communicative strategies which allow them to cope with various problems that they may encounter.As far as the development of intercultural communicative competence is concerned, most attention is paid to cultural knowledge dimension, while the strategic dimension is ignored. This encourages the dissertation to put intercultural communicative competence development model into communication system. The assumption is that if language...