The Design, Based On The Moodle Platform, Cross-cultural Foreign Language Activity Courses

The ever increasing trend of economic globalization requires foreign language teaching to develop both students'language proficiency and their intercultural communication competence. Accordingly, an intercultural approach has become a focus of attention among foreign language teachers and researchers. The traditional classroom teaching, however, cannot meet the need of developing foreign language learners'intercultural communication competence due to the limit of time and resources. Activity class is thus proposed to compensate for this weakness.Activity class is independent of the traditional school curriculum, and it is different from traditional class in that it is activity-based, so the designing of activities is of prime importance. Learning environment creation, as an essential element of activity designing, is the key to the success of an activity class. The rapid development of web technology provides favorable conditions for activity class designing and implementation.Moodle is a widely used web-based teaching software, which can integrate web resources and provide a virtual environment for activity classes. It allows teachers to manage the class and the teaching conveniently, and enables students and teachers to communicate and cooperate with each other easily. Its course designing template serves as an easy tool for teachers to design their own teaching.The purpose of this thesis is to design and implement an Intercultural Foreign Language Activity Course. It is composed of 7 sections. The first section explains the background, significance, main contents and research methods of the thesis. The second section is a literature review of intercultural communication competence studies. Activity class-related theories are elaborated in the third section. On the basis of an introduction of the Moodle software, the fourth section examines the possibility and advantages of using Moodle to design activity classes. The fifth section is devoted to the development of the Intercultural Foreign Language Activity Course. In the sixth section, the author proposes a procedure of implementing this course and reminds readers about the possible difficulties. The last section is a summary of the thesis.