The Two - Way Importance Of English And Chinese Culture And The Cultivation Of Intercultural Communicative Competence Of Senior High School Students

With people from all over the word communicating frequently, intercultural awareness and intercultural competence become more and more important. In2003curriculum criterion for senior high school, curriculum aim mentions that students should form the intercultural awareness and intercultural competence. In today’s English teaching in senior high school, however, teachers who attach to English culture are little and who pay attention to Chinese culture teaching are less. To cultivate students’ intercultural competence, English teaching should be based on the comparison between English culture and Chinese culture. Only in this way, can students’intercultural competence be improved.According to the theories of Fantini, intercultural competence includes attitude aspect, knowledge aspect and behavior aspect. Therefore, this study tries to start from these three aspects to investigate the situation of students’ intercultural competence in senior high school. As culture teaching is an important way to cultivate students’ intercultural competence, this study adopts the ways from the perspective of bidirectional input of culture.This research is an investigative one which employs quantitative and qualitative research approaches. It focuses on two questions:1) what’s the current situation of bidirectional input of culture teaching?2) what’s the current situation of students’ intercultural competence in senior high school? In order to find out the answers, one questionnaire is used to investigate40English teachers in two senior high schools in Nanjing and one questionnaire and one intercultural competence test are carried out for students’intercultural competence. SPSS18.0is applied to analyze the data. It shows that the intercultural competence of senior high school students is not high and differs from students to students. They performed badly in social values and social principle and conversation principle and couldn’t choose right communicative behavior. What’s more, the feedback of culture teaching is not good. Teachers’teaching doesn’t mean students’ learning, which implies that teachers has already taught students about English and Chinese culture at class but students couldn’t take in. We also can see this point from the result of intercultural competence test. Both teachers and students agree the importance of culture teaching and the lack of culture material in textbook. They also thought that in real teaching, language teaching values more than culture teaching.Based on the research results, several suggestions are mentioned as followed:1) form complete and reasonable teaching system of intercultural competence. About teaching arrangement, a certain cultural teaching lesson should be arranged; about teaching content, language teaching and culture teaching are parallel.2) cultivate English teachers, amplify the culture content of textbook and add more culture material to the class.3) develop the assessment system of English curriculum, not only by the way testing students’English ability through language points, but through more scientific way to assess students’ real English ability.