The Cultivation Of The Intercultural Communicative Competence For Non-English Majors

The rapid progress in communication technology and the economic globalization have changed people's ideas about time and space and have brought about frequent communications among people of different cultural backgrounds. As an international language, English will be much more popular in the open and developing China with our entry into WTO and the undertaking of Olympic Games in 2008. Therefore, intercultural communication has been an inseparable part of people's life today. However, it is not difficult to find that although the students have received several years of formal English education and got their certificates on CET4 or even CET6, they frequently remain deficient in their ability to actually use English. They cannot either open their mouth to speak English or understand the appropriate use in normal intercultural communication. Such deficiency and inappropriateness in their communications should draw our immediate attention. It is quite evident that developing students' intercultural communicative competence should be the ultimate goal of College English Teaching (CET). To achieve such a goal, culture teaching is of vital necessity in CET.In the hope of improving culture teaching in CET and facilitating students' intercultural communicative competence, the present dissertation attempts to explore effective ways of culture teaching for non-English majors in CET. Since early 1980s, more and more English teachers have come to realize the critical role of culture teaching in English language education. And many language educators have introduced from foreign countries various culture teaching theories and pedagogies into China and set up their own culture teaching models feasible in Chinese contexts. However, most of these introductions and researches are meant for English majors, and few papers discuss the cultivation of intercultural communicative competence fornon-English majors. Therefore, this dissertation attempts to make some researches in this field.Language and culture are closely related to each other. Language is a part of culture and is shaped by culture; it is also the carrier of culture and it reflects cultural features of a community in which the language is spoken. From the angle of language teaching and learning, to teach a language is to teach another culture; to learn a language is also to learn another culture. Therefore, language teaching and culture teaching are inseparable. The essential purpose of language teaching is not only to teach linguistic knowledge but also to teach how to use the language appropriately in the intercultural communication. Therefore, students should be encouraged not only to have a good command of the linguistic knowledge and skills, but also to develop the intercultural communicative competence. And as we all know, it is only in English departments in most universities in China that some specialized courses about western culture such as Cultural Background Knowledge etc. are offered. Compared with culture teaching for English majors, culture teaching for non-English majors is weaker. There are no such specialized courses as Communication between Cultures in non-English departments in the universities; thus, unlike English majors, non-English majors cannot get the cultivation of intercultural communicative competence theoretically and systematically. Therefore, the cultivation of intercultural communicative competence of non-English majors should integrate language with culture. That is, contents of culture teaching should be integrated into the teaching of linguistic knowledge and the training of four important skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing.With the theoretical researches of language, culture, communication, intercultural communication and their relationships as its theoretical basis, this dissertation looks back culture teaching researches abroad and at home. Based on the analysis of the structuralism, the syllabus, teaching materials, teaching methods, notions of teaching and the evaluation system, etc., it reveals the present situation of CET as well as its existing problems in culture teaching. The causes of non-English majors' weakness in intercultural communication will be explored. It also endeavorsto trace the causes of intercultural miscommunication and the culture differences which might cause communication failure. All of these are the prerequisites for the further discussion of how to organize culture teaching in language teaching, in the attempt to cultivate the students' intercultural awareness and to improve their intercultural communicative competence, which is the core of this dissertation.