An Investigation Into Senior High School English Teachers' Intercultural Communicative Competence

It has been widely accepted that one of the ultimate goals of EFL teaching is to cultivate learners' Intercultural Communicative Competence(ICC).As we know,the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China(MEPRC) has set out the requirements of cultivating senior high school students' intercultural awareness and developing their ICC in 2003.However,compared with the increasing number of studies on students' ICC,there are few empirical studies on English teachers' ICC, especially on senior high school English teachers from the aspect of teaching.The thesis attempts to explore the present state of the ICC of today's English teachers in senior high schools,and find out the underlying factors responsible for it in the domain of high school TEFL(teaching English as foreign language).According to the model proposed by Byram(1997),a well-known sociologist,it can be concluded that ICC includes three layers--intercultural knowledge,awareness, and behavior.35 English teachers from different senior high schools participated in the study.This study employed two research designs:a quantitative design and qualitative design.The former includes two ICC tests and three questionnaires;the latter an interview.Based on the "Culture Test Model" proposed by Valette(1977),the "Socio-cultural Test" proposed by Wang Zhenya(2005) and the national test papers of "Language and Culture" for National Higher Education Examination for the Self-Study from 2001 to 2006,two tests are designed to investigate teachers' intercultural knowledge and behavior.As for intercultural awareness,the questionnaire one (Intercultural Sensitivity Scale) is adopted.The second and third questionnaires, adapted from the questionnaires on culture teaching designed by Paloma Castro etal. (2004) and Lessard-Clouston(1996),are respectively for teachers and students in order to find out the underlying factors of teachers' high or low level of ICC in the high school teaching context.According to their high,medium and low level of ICC,10 teachers were selected out of the valid 35 subjects through stratified random sampling for the interview to explore the reasons further.Based on the data collected from the study,the major findings are summarized as follows:(1) English teachers' intercultural communicative competence at senior high schools displays an unbalanced distribution.Test results showed that they were weak in both intercultural knowledge and behavior,a sharp contrast with intercultural awareness. What's more,there is no significant difference between the teachers with intercultural communication training and those without by employing independent-samples t-test. Although all the teachers have a relatively high intercultural awareness,their current ICC is not satisfactory.(2) Although ESC has proposed requirements of cultivating senior high school students' intercultural awareness and developing their ICC,teachers do not have enough capacity to implement the teaching goals.The vast majority of senior high school English teachers tend to avoid culture teaching and pay more attention to language teaching.On the one hand,it is because of their low ICC;on the other hand, the senior high school teaching is dominated by the tests,and the current tests do not include the content related to intercultural communication,which makes teachers have no desire to advance their ICC.Based on the above results,the thesis points out that enhancing ICC of English teacher at senior high schools and English majors at normal universities is a task of top priority and some related constructive suggestions are offered.The study is limited in the range of investigation,which is not wide enough and the randomly chosen samples, which might not ensure that the interviewees fully represent the population.