Cultivating The Intercultural Communicative Competence Of College Engineering Students

From country to country, social taboos, politics, religious traditions and values differ. Intercultural communication refers to communication between people of different cultures. The thesis outlines some of the key terms and complexities that surround the advocacy of teaching college English for intercultural communicative competence (ICC). It is concerned with the consideration and incorporation of the teaching of culture into the college English classroom. Besides, from the cultural perspective, I have singled out the China's strong collectivism and Confucianism as the major factors which inhibit speaking English within the college context. More specifically, some consideration will be given to the ways and contents of cultural cultivation which involves so many topics to college engineering students, since they usually do not have close contact with native speakers of English and have little opportunity to discover how these speakers think, feel and act in their own way. Furthermore, an attempt will be made to incorporate culture into the classroom by means of considering some techniques and methods currently used.The research materials and empirical data on the impact of cultural values on communicative patterns were collected and processed at Qingdao University of Science and Technology. My ethnographic investigation of 135 engineering students in QUST included questionnaire, interviews and observation.It is now commonly accepted that foreign language students should focus their study not only on the form of the language, but also on its social rules—the knowledge of when, how and to whom it is appropriate to use these forms. It is also now realized that successful communication involves intercultural understanding which among other things, means avoiding pragmatic failure. Language is inextricably tied to culture. Therefore, language teaching should include culture teaching. In the cultivation of intercultural communicative competence, I put my emphasis on the development of students' cultural awareness and communicative competence. In my opinion, in foreign language classrooms, "pure information" isuseful but does not necessarily lead our students to insight, whereas the development of students' cultural awareness leads them to more critical thinking as citizens with social understanding of their own and other communities.Current college English teaching still makes most students remain deficient in the ability to actually use the language, and to understand its use in normal communication, whether in the spoken or written mode, although the students have received several years of formal English teaching. Many a student with good grades in school performs poorly in social situations. They are often thought of as "high in scores, but low in ability". Wolfson points out, "In interacting with foreigners, native speakers tend to be rather tolerant of errors in pronunciation or syntax. In contrast, violations of rules of speaking are often interpreted as bad manners since the native speaker is unlikely to be aware of sociolinguistic relativity" (1983:62). Misunderstanding caused by intercultural pragmatic differences is an important source of intercultural communication breakdown and much attention should be paid to them in ELT.Foreign language learning is comprised of several components, including grammatical competence, communicative competence, language proficiency, as well as a change in attitudes towards one's own or another culture. Cultural competence, i.e., the knowledge of the conventions, customs, beliefs, and systems of meaning of another country, is an integral part of foreign language learning, and many teachers have seen it as their goal to incorporate the teaching of culture into the foreign language curriculum.At any rate, foreign language learning is foreign culture learning, and, in one form or another, culture has, even implicitly, been taught in the foreign language classrooms. The main premise of this thesis is that we cannot go about teaching a foreign language without at least offering some insights into its speakers' culture. Likewise, we cannot go about fostering "communicative competence" without taking into account the different views and perspectives of people in different cultures which may enhance or even inhibit communication. After all, communication requires understanding, and understanding requires stepping into the shoes of the foreigner andsifting her cultural baggage, while always 'putting [the target] culture in relation with one's own' (Kramsch, 1993: 205).Including introduction and conclusion, this thesis is divided into seven chapters. Chapter one offers general introduction of college English learning and provides a brief account of the problems and methodology of ICC; chapter two centers around literature review of ICC and cultural awareness; chapter three involves the definition and connotation of culture and the cultural factors that inhabit English learning, it also interprets the cultural differences between western and Chinese culture; chapter four focuses on the teaching and incorporating of culture in a college English context, role playing is highly recommended as an effective means of cultural cultivation in the intensive English classroom; chapter five is concerning the case study of the impact of ICC on English studies. To make a meaningful survey of the current ICC of college engineering students, both socio-cultural questionnaire and structured interviews are carried out. Meanwhile, findings of the research in teaching and learning are also put forward; Strategies and new techniques of cultural cultivation will be mentioned in Chapter six. Chapter seven summarizes the whole study and addresses suggestions for future research. Finally, appendixes are enclosed at the end of the thesis.