An Investigation And Development Of The First-year College English Major's Cross-cultural Communicative Competence

In the past few decades, English teaching in China has put particular stress on cultivating students'linguistic competence, which refers to listening, speaking, reading and writing skills while neglecting the introduction of social-culture knowledge. Since 1980s, hot discussions on the relationships among language, culture and cross-cultural communication have appeared in China. An increasing number of researchers and educators began to be aware of the vital importance of culture introduction in English teaching and learning. New theories and new thoughts were brought in and a large number of works and theses are written with proposals and suggestions of cultivating English learners'cross-cultural awareness and developing their cross-cultural communicative competence.However, few researches have been done on cultivating the first-year college English majors'cross-cultural communicative competence. It is a fact that college English majors, whose specialty determines that they will play an important role of language bridge in future international economic and cultural exchanges after the graduation, have already acquired the communicative competence in native tongue and internalized native culture which is closely related to the language use. Under such conditions, students may misunderstand what is embedded in the language of English, due to different communicative model and content. And what they have acquired about native culture and language may cause negative understanding in English. Because the studying period of college students is comparatively short which is only 3 years, their linguistic and socio-cultural competence need to be improved by making a thorough investigation of their competence situation at the beginning of their first year's studying and carrying out working culture teaching plans according to the analysis and conclusions of the investigation.This thesis deals with an investigation and development of the first-year college English majors'cross-cultural communicative competence. To investigate the currentsituation of their cross-cultural communicative competence, the author...