Cultivating Chinese College Students' EFL Intercultural Communicative Competence In The Teaching Of English: Based On The Schema Theory

With the intense competition in job-hunting today, CET4 becomes an effective standard of evaluating English proficiency of non-English majors, in which the scores of reading comprehension account for 35 percent. Much attention is therefore paid to how to make a breakthrough in the teaching of reading comprehension, of which, the cultivation of effective communicational competence is of great importance for the students, and of great disturbance for the teachers. Non-English majors usually have two years for English learning at college, of which reading comprehension takes a large proportion. Therefore, it is necessary to figure out the difficulties in reading teaching and to work out specific solutions so as to improve students'reading comprehension competence by cultivating effective communicative competence.137 freshmen of non-English majors at Xi'hua University participated in the questionnaires and interviews for this research. The purpose is to investigate their basic understanding in cross-cultural communication and their difficulty in reading comprehension. The results are as follows:English teaching in middle school generally focus on the cultivation of students' language competence, and the students'six years'learning is usually college-entrance -examination-oriented. This results in teachers'much focusing on the students'master of linguistic knowledge and sentences translating instead of the teaching of culture.In English reading teaching in middle school, the students do not have the essential knowledge about the culture of English-speaking countries, and their discourse knowledge is weak.It never occurs to non-English majors that the deficiency in communicative competence have direct impact on their reading comprehension competence.Under this situation, in order to cultivate the cross-cultural communicative competence of non-English majors, the author puts forth some specific solutions as follows:Teaching grammar and vocabulary from a view point of linguistic schemaTeaching background knowledge from a view point of content schema.Teaching English styles from a view point of rhetoric schema...