A Study On The Intercultural Communicative Competence Of Senior High School Students

In recent years, one of the important goals of English teaching is to do research about the communicative teaching principal and it's application in English teaching. There is a clear description in The English Syllabus of Senior Middle School about the commucicative principle in English teaching and the relationship between language and culture. It shows that there has been a deep understanding about the nature and function of the English language in English teaching field. So, I did a research on the high school students'mastering of the English language and culture as well as their intercultural communicative competence. My purpose of doing the research is to see how well the high school students understand the English culture and to see the level of their intercultural communicative competenceThe writer handed out one hundred and ten questionnaires among senior 3 students.Through analyzing these questionnaires, the writer got the following findings: The high school students just have little knowledge about English culture and their intercultural communicative competence is very poor. There are three reasons for this. First, the students'understanding about English culture is limited. Second, Chinese has a a great effect on their English learning. Third, the high school education is led by the college entrance examination.What the students want to do is to pass the college entrance examination. But there is limited English cultural knowledge in the examination. So, in daily teaching, the teachers pay too much attention to teaching the knowledge of the English language. They ignore the methods of improving the students'intercultural communicative competence. Therefore, we get the result that the students are good at answering the questions about the knowledge of the English language . Their knowledge about English culture is poor and their intercultural communicative competence is low.The study has proved from one aspect that we must add a certain cultural knowledge about English countries in English teaching process and cultivate the high students'intercultural communicative competenceThe significance of the research is that it includes both the teachers and the students. So, it has a deep meaning in improving the cultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence of the students in their English learning process. Another significance is that it suggests to the teachers the importance of putting cultural materials in English teaching.The ultimate goal in learning a language should be using the language. So, the ultimate language teaching goal should be improving the students'competence of using the language.There is also limitation in this paper. The limitation is that the writer couldn't do the research among a large range of teachers and students and the data of the research can't include all the teachers and students. The writer will try to do deeper research in the future.