A Study On The Cultivation Of Cultural Empathy Competence Of English Learners In Vocational Technical College

In recent years, intercultural communication has developed with a fast speed. In the field of foreign language education, it also comes to a consensus that the ultimate goal of foreign language teaching is to stimulate students'successful intercultural communication and cultural teaching has become the focus in foreign language education. It is expected that students are able to communicate more successfully through learning the cultural knowledge of the target language.However, in the course of intercultural communication, when people with diverse cultural backgrounds communicate with each other, their cultural value tendency is likely to interfere with the interactive process and lead to the failure of intercultural communication. In order to eliminate and avoid the cultural barriers in intercultural communication, researchers believe that communicators must develop cultural empathy competence.Cultural empathy means that, in intercultural communication, both the speaker and hearer consciously and willingly shifts from one's own frame of reference and actively projects oneself in another cultural pattern, feeling, understanding and appreciating another culture, without abandoning one's own perspective on the situation. Cultural empathy plays a decisive role in intercultural communication. It is impossible for the communicators with low cultural empathy competence to fully understand others and achieve successful communication.Currently, the researches on cultural empathy have been focused on the theoretical exploration. This paper conducts an empirical study about current level of cultural empathy competence of English learners in vocational technical college and accordingly puts forward some suggestions to improve students'cultural empathy competence in order to stimulate effective intercultural communication. Based on the previous studies, this thesis makes a research about 150 English learners from three vocational technical colleges in Jinan. The study shows: students have possessed certain cultural empathy competence, but in a lower level; verbal expression and cultural knowledge are two major barriers restricting the employment of empathy competence in communication; English teachers have great impact on improving students'cultural empathy competence.Based on the research results, this paper offers several suggestions to improve English learners'cultural empathy competence, from students and teachers'point of view respectively. For the English teachers, it is important to stimulate students'English learning interest and help students with the study of British-American cultures in English learning, by means of building self-image and harmonious teacher-student relationship, creating interactive and relaxing learning atmosphere and so on. From students'perspective, they should improve their oral English through imitating, dictating and talking to oneself, and also should build up right cultural values.