Study Of The Application Of Intercultural Communication Theory In College Spoken English Teaching

Intercultural communication is a historical cultural phenomenon which grows with the development of human being. It is a modern life style and internal drive of the cultural development. Intercultural communication research is to obtain the cultural identity by "mutual reference" and new ideological resources via dialogue between different cultures. Under the circumstance of the economic globalization, intercultural activities become more active and frequent. Mass media plays an important role in the intercultural communication and promotes the communication and integration during the process of altering the traditional cultural rim and extending the cultural space.Chinese students must know the target culture as much as possible and be familiar with the target cultural connotation, perceiving and strengthening their language and culture with perceptive mechanism and experience of target culture. Traditional oral English teaching approaches in China put much more emphasis on the cultivation of language competence than communicative competence, which result in students' inabilities to communicate. Therefore, in order to speak very good English, students must foster their intercultural communicative awareness, learning the target culture, background, customs and life styles on the basis of acquired language skills. Different cultures and values will make different understandings of the conversation. If those differences can't be recognized, cultural conflicts and miscommunication will be made during the interaction. In recent years, as international exchanges are more and more frequent in China, English teachers have obtained new ideas of spoken English teaching. Internet generates great driving forces to intercultural communication; meanwhile, it brings new inspiration and teaching ideology to foreign language teaching. Mass communicative technology changes with each passing day, and information has been broadly spread and transmitted, which largely enriched the verbal expressions of modern English. This paper is divided into five chapters:The first chapter is the literature review. This part is mainly the historical background of intercultural communicative theory.The second chapter: The writer further discussed the influence of intercultural communicative theory on spoken English teaching from the aspects of linguistic theory and learning theory. This chapter introduced intercultural communicative competence which included language competence, cognitive competence, affective competence, relational competence, etc. It also introduced Hofstede's culture model which put emphasis on the instructive role played by intercultural communicative theory in language teaching, and the significance of communicative activities in promoting the students' communicative competence and spoken ability.Chapter three consists of five parts. This chapter mainly described the research questions, purposes and significance, participants, methods and instruments of this study. In this chapter, three questions were put forward: (1) Can the application of intercultural communicative theory foster the learners' communicative awareness? (2) Can the application of intercultural communicative theory promote the learners' communicative competence? (3) Are the intercultural communicative activities very helpful to the promotion of the learners' spoken ability? The participants of this study were 36 first year non-English major undergraduate students of Wuhan University. The writer took the form of questionnaire to have a pre-investigation of the students to collect the first hand information which included the students' attitude and motivation in language learning. Then the application of pragmatic test in this study was introduced. The following were intercultural communicative activities and procedures of the study.Chapter four: After 11 weeks spoken English teaching, the writer did the comparative tests to the students. The data analysis proved that the application of intercultural communicative theory was very effective on fostering the students' intercultural communicative competence and promoting their spoken abilities. Through tests and data analysis, three questions put forward in chapter three were answered: (1) The application of intercultural communicative theory has fostered the learners' communicative awareness. (2) The application of intercultural communicative theory has promoted the learners' communicative competence. (3) The intercultural communicative activities are very helpful to the promotion of thelearners' spoken ability.Chapter five: The study of intercultural communication involves wide ranges with strong practicability. In this paper, many statements are associated with the hot topics discussed in the current studies of communication. It points out that spoken English teaching should go along with the intercultural communication practice.