Empathy In Language Learning And Its Inspiration To The Development Of Intercultural Communicative Competence

Intercultural communication has become a heated field of research in China's foreign language teaching and learning, and communicating with people from different cultures is becoming a life style of many Chinese. Therefore, the work for foreign language learning is no longer confined to learning the vocabulary and grammar, but has been extended to an important field of how to communicate effectively and appropriately in the target language. Based on the research of former scholars, this thesis puts forward the idea that intercultural communicative competence can be improved by acquiring moderate empathy ability. In order to make this hypothesis clear, the first thing to do is to explain the concept empathy. This is a term originally applied in aesthetics, and later in psychology. Because of the contribution of Susumu Kuno (1987), it was introduced into the field of linguistics, in which it was originally used to explain sentence structures. In addition to this, empathy is also a type of communicative behavior that is closely linked to cognitive processes, and because of this it is also widely applied in pragmatics and intercultural communication. Hymes'(1971) theory on communicative competence is presented in the thesis. In order to achieve effective intercultural communication by showing empathy, communicators should by all means try to overcome the hindrances to empathy, i.e. ethnocentrism, prejudice and lack of knowledge, motivation and skills. However, in the process of showing empathy, communicators should also try to avoid over-empathizing and under-empathizing. The final goal is to show moderate empathy and still remain one's own identity.