Cultivating The Intercultural Communicative Competence Of Students In Higher Vocational Colleges

This thesis wants to propose a suggestion that we should pay attention to the cultivation of the students' intercultural communicative competence in the foreign language teaching of higher vocational college. It first points out the fact that under the present form of foreign language education system, students in vocational college learn a foreign language just for exams sake. As a result, though students get high marks, they have low abilities, i.e. poor practical language competence and poor communicative competence. They can't adapt to the working environment or meet the need of our society. In terms of the case, the author analyses the reasons for these facts and points out the necessity of cultivating higher vocational students' intercultural communicative competence.The thesis has elaborated this issue on four aspects.Chapter one first looks back to the history of intercultural communication, discusses the definitions of "communicative competence" and "intercultural communicative competence", and explains the theories of intercultural communication, communicative language teaching and pragmatics and point out the necessity of cultivating intercultural communicative competence.Chapter two describes the inseparability of language and culture. It uses examples of culture differences to emphasize that if acculturation has not been added to foreign language teaching the students will meet with a lot of failures. So the author uses the idea of"acculturation" and at the same time, three approaches are put forward: comparing and contrasting cultures, directing acculturation in foreign language teaching, and teaching culture in a communicative way. The authc,r explains each of the approaches and gives some examples to put them into practice.Chapter three introduces several teaching methods of cultivating higher vocational students' intercultural communicative competence with reference to the author's ten years' teaching experience in higher vocational colleges. The author analyses the characteristics of higher vocational students and points out three affecting factors of the cultivation: relationships between the teacher and students, psychological factors and cultural factors. Some effective methods are as follows: interactive language teaching, creating intercultural environments, developing out-of-class activities and the use of technology. Finally the author reaches her conclusion that cultivating the students' intercultural communicative competence is feasible as well as practical.In chapter four, the author gives some suggestions to correct the shortcomings of the present foreign language education system in order to cultivate higher vocational students' intercultural communicative competence better. Four methods of curriculum reform in higher vocational colleges are provided the reform of: syllabus, teaching material, teacher development and test. The author looks forward to doing something useful in cultivating higher vocational college students' language abilities.