Cultivating Intercultural Communicative Competence In English Language Teaching

The ultimate goal in foreign language teaching and learning should be the cultivation of intercultural communicative competence. Language study is an important part of language teaching, and language teaching, to a large extent, should be the teaching of the target culture. In China, English language teaching is in the domain of foreign language teaching. For a long time, in the process of teaching, particular stress has been put on developing students' linguistic competence, which includes listening, speaking, reading and writing abilities, while little attention is paid to the introduction of socio-cultural knowledge of the target language, thus the cultivation of practical competence in intercultural communication is neglected. Nowadays, people are fully aware that English is important for personal success in education and in their careers and development, and English learning is playing a significant role in one's educational program. For this reason, a great deal of effort has been made in order to teach and learn English well. With the rapid development of high technology and social economy, the world is becoming increasingly small and the notion of "global village" has come into being. There is no doubt that, in this era, we interact with people of different cultural backgrounds much more frequently than before. To guarantee an effective intercultural communication, a fund of knowledge about target culture is needed, besides, people should have a good command of different cultures and should fully understand the cultural differences in intercultural communication. Therefore, The cultivation of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) is now becoming more and more important in English language teaching.This thesis maintains that culture learning and language teaching can benefit from each other, which in turn contributes to the cultivation of ICC.This paper is an endeavor to combine cultural understanding with English language teaching. The theme of this thesis is that culture learning as an inseparable part of language learning should be given equal attention. The thesis discusses the aspects of the theoretical basis dealing with ICC, explores the problems of cultivating ICC in English language teaching, and proposes some tentative methods to solve the problems so that culture introduction can be incorporated simultaneously in language teaching. Therefore, the thesis contends that not only in their teaching practice and material selection, language teachers should pay particular attention to the cultivation of students' sensitiveness to the target culture and pay attention to the raising of their efficiency in learning;but also language learners should systematically learn the cultural aspects of the target language through various in-class and out-of-class activities to improve their language proficiency.Language teaching is both a theoretical and practical work, however, the study of the theories is still mainly concerned more with the theory than with its application. It is the purpose of this thesis that more language teachers will apply the teaching theories to their practical teaching so as to benefit the students eventually. It is the writer's sincere hope that English teachers will make a further study on the practical teaching approaches to integrate the cultivation of ICC into English language teaching in order to improve the students' competence in intercultural communication.