Cultivating Intercultural Communicative Competence For Non-English Majors

With the economic globalization, intercultural communication becomes more and more frequent. As the most widely used international language, English becomes more and more important. In China, English is attached great importance in educational area. It becomes a compulsory course from primary school on. In college entrance examination, the percentage of English is the same as Chinese, our mother tongue. Further more, college students must pass CET band 4 if they want to get their bachelors'degree and CET4 and even CET6 certificate is crucial in their job seeking.Chinese students spend a lot of time on English learning because of the importance it gains. However, many college graduates who get their certificate on CET4 or even CET6 remain deficient in their actually use English. Poor oral English and inappropriate expressions often put communicators into awkwardness and even conflict in intercultural communication. Those communication breakdowns attract the attention of foreign language educators. They discuss the efficiency of college English teaching and reach a negative conclusion, i.e. Chinese FLT cannot meet the requirement of cultivating students'language proficiency. They then put forward reform suggestions on teaching ideology, teaching objective and teaching methods, etc.. There are achievements in the reform, yet a well-formed model for FLT is not achieved.The thesis is also an attempt in the reforming of FLT in Chinese universities. It holds the idea that developing students'intercultural communicative competence is the goal of foreign language teaching. Generally speaking, students'ICC is the competence to communicate effectively and appropriately with people from cultures other than their own. As the focus of this thesis is on the non-English majors, concerning the characteristics of their curricular design, i. e. they do not have such courses as language and culture, intercultural communication etc., the most effective way for cultivating their ICC is to incorporate culture teaching into language teaching. The thesis mainly discusses the following four questions:First, it defines the term intercultural communicative competence. Once ICC is taken as the ultimate goal of FLT, a clear understanding of what ICC is and what the components of it are must be clarified.Second, it discusses the relationship between language and culture from the perspective of English as an international language. It also reviews the culture teaching in FLT and finds out that most achievements are related to English majors. Much work left undone for non-English majors. FLT for non-English majors can be approached by incorporating culture teaching into language teaching, thus help students to improve their ICC.Third, it carries out an investigation on two important aspects of FLT: learner and learning materials. For students, it uses a questionnaire to test their ICC and to collect their feedback to FLT. By comparing freshmen and sophomore's scores in the test, it gets a general idea which shows current FLT is not effective in cultivating students'ICC. By the feedback, it finds that students'objective is quite utilitarian which is not good for cultivating their ICC. Also from the evaluation of two sets of most widely used textbooks, it finds that culture study is not explicitly addressed in them.Fourth, it proposes some tentative suggestions on FLT. Suggestions are about teaching objective, attitudes towards culture and some specific techniques of incorporating culture teaching into language teaching. All these suggestions are of one object: how to fulfill the goal of FLT, i.e., the cultivation of students'ICC.To sum up, the thesis focuses on the research question"How to improve students ICC in FLT". Centered around this question, the definition of ICC, the relationship between language and culture, how to incorporate culture teaching into language teaching so as to improve students'ICC are discussed.