Developing Intercultural Strategic Competence In Oral English Teaching

Nowadays developing learners' intercultural communicative competence has been one of the ultimate goals of FLT. How to improve learners' intercultural communicative competence becomes a crucial task for language teachers. An essential approach to achieving this goal is to help learners use communication strategies properly and effectively. There exists an inevitable gap between what learners are taught and what they need in coping with unpredictable situations, and the gap can be bridged by communication strategies. Communication strategies are of relevance to L2 learning. First, they can be used to help learners solve problems in communications by playing their compensatory roles when linguistic knowledge is not available. Second, communication strategies can keep communication going, make learners receive more input and relieve their anxiety and frustration. Third, communication strategies are vital to L2 learners because their L2 knowledge is restricted so they may confront much more difficulties than native speakers in communication. So it is absolutely necessary to make a study of communication strategies.In the view of intercultural communication characteristics of the contemporary world, a mastery of communication strategies is in great need. Communicators' intercultural communicative competence can be developed by building up their strategic competence, that is, their ability to use communication strategies that allow them to cope with various problems that they may encounter. Thus, the thesis makes a tentative and exploratory study of putting intercultural communicative competence development into communication strategy system. The study of communication strategies has been an exciting area of research for about three decades. However, most researchers dwell their studies on a single party--the language learner's communication strategies in the perspective of production. They still lack coherent and systematic studies concerning communication strategies. As to the development of intercultural communicative competence, most attention is paid to cultural knowledge dimension, while the strategic dimension is ignored. All these encourage the thesis to put intercultural communicative competence development model into communication strategy system. The assumption is that if language learners obtain sufficient communication strategy training in the perspective of production and reception, they will cooperate with their communicative partners in genuine communication and their intercultural communicative competence will be developed accordingly.Since the study of communication strategies is not adequate in China, this thesis puts forward a comprehensive analysis of communication strategy by discussing its definition, typology and main components. The writer further conducts an investigation to examining students' attitude toward communication strategies and the frequency of using them in communication. Through the analysis of the data by SPSS, the results indicate: students have a positive attitude toward achievement strategies and a negative attitude toward reduction strategies, and their attitude to reduction strategies has significant difference, that is, the higher the language proficiency, the lower belief in reduction strategies; the frequency of using reduction strategies has significant difference among different language proficiency students; reasons accounting for these results are also explored.On the basis of the results, the writer points out that learners can use various communication strategies, but what they lack is not the strategies themselves but how to use them appropriately and effectively in communication. Accordingly, the author puts forward some suggestions about how to improve learners' ability to use communication strategies in oral English teaching. In oral English teaching, the writer illustrates some practical means to apply communication strategies to classroom, such as role-playing, simulation and mime and give a specific illustration of them.The whole thesis can be divided into four chapters:The first part is Introduction, which gives a general account of the current state of FLT in China concerning the studies of communication strategies and intercultural communicative competence. Chapter One analyzes the definitions, typologies and main components of intercultural communicative competence. The thesis proposes that intercultural communicative competence be a multi-dimensional concept that involves learners' basic communication competence, affective competence, relational competence, episodic competence and strategic competence. Chapter Two presents the definitions and typologies of communication strategies. The presentation of various definitions of communication strategies makes it evident that it would be better to describe the notion of communication strategies as a set of characteristics rather than a single statement. By reviewing the course of the development in the study of communication strategies, it is found that Tarone's definition is comparatively reasonable whereas Faerch and Kasper's classification is deficient for it fails to describe the strategies on the reception side. Chapter Three is an investigation on the usage of communication strategies among English majors from Foreign Language School, Linyi Teachers' University and a conclusion is made. Chapter Four explores the factors affecting the learners' choice of communication strategies and the feasibility of teaching communication strategies in oral English classroom, and the application of communication strategies to the development of intercultural communicative competence. And last part concludes the whole thesis by pointing out that it is feasible and imperative to combine the study on communication strategies with the study on the development of intercultural communicative competence in oral English teaching. Moreover, some suggestions are made for future study.