On Cultivating Intercultural Communicative Competence In Vocational College English Teaching

With the rapid development of world economy and globalization, the world we live in is becoming a "global village". Therefore, intercultural communication is becoming more and more important nowadays. In this case, there is no denying that the objective of English teaching is to cultivate intercultural communicative competence.However, from middle schools to colleges in many regions of China, English language teaching is still based on the test-oriented education. Students are compelled to learn vocabulary and grammar in class. Many English teachers in vocational colleges still only focus on the development of linguistic knowledge such as: listening, speaking, reading and writing, while culture knowledge included in language is usually neglected in English teaching. Some language teachers seldom introduce western cultures to their students. When students communicate with foreigners in a real context, they remain deficient in starting the conversation and communicating appropriately, which may cause misunderstanding and put the dialogists into embarrassment or even conflict. According to the purpose of English teaching in vocational education, the aim is to improve and cultivate the students' communicative competence for practical work. Culture knowledge is indispensable to communicative competence. Learning a foreign language is not only a process of mastering and using the language but a process of getting to know and understand another society and culture as well. So it is really necessary for English educators to impart English culture knowledge in their teaching practice so as to help students better understand English and its culture, improve their cross-cultural communicative competence.The thesis is an attempt in the reforming of FLT in vocational colleges of China. It holds the idea that developing students'intercultural communicative competence is the goal of foreign language teaching. Generally speaking, students'ICC refers to the competence to communicate effectively and appropriately with people from other cultures. As the focus of this thesis is on the non-English majors in vocational colleges, concerning the characteristics of their curricular design, i.e. they do not have such courses as language and culture, intercultural communication etc., the most effective way for cultivating their ICC is to incorporate culture teaching into language teaching. An experimental study, which lasted for eighteen weeks was set up in the paper, for the purpose of finding out answers to the following specific questions: What is the present situation of vocational college students' intercultural awareness and competence? How do students acquire culture knowledge? In what effective ways of culture teaching can we improve students' English intercultural communicative competence?The subjects of the experiment consist of 112 second-year students from Shi Jiangzhuang Information Engineering Vocational College, whose English levels are intermediate. Prior to the experiment, they are divided into two separate classes: the Experimental Class and the Controlled Class, each including 56 students. A pre-test and a questionnaire were conducted in order to get a rough view of the students' intercultural awareness and socio-cultural competence before the experiment was unfolded. In the following one-semester session of the experiment, the EC and CC adopted culture teaching approach and traditional language teaching method respectively. After the research, another socio-cultural test and an interview were also administered to investigate whether the intercultural communicative competence of the subjects was improved. Based on the data analysis and comparisons of pre-test and post-test between EC and CC, the research problems were solved by evidence. The results clearly show that the integrated culture teaching approach is effective in improving students'intercultural communication competence.This thesis is composed of five chapters. The first chapter is an introduction, which begins with the necessity of cultivating learner's intercultural communicative competence and describes the present situation of vocational college English teaching in China, the definitions of language, culture and communication are also included in this chapter. Chapter two is the literature review, which introduces the theories of intercultural communication and intercultural communicative competence as well as the studies in this field both home and abroad. Chapter three focuses on an experimental study of cultivating vocational college learners'intercultural communicative competence. In Chapter four, some useful statistics and information got from questionnaires and tests are elaborately analysed. Chapter five serves as a conclusion, which summarizes the main points and findings of the research, also proposes the pedagogical implications for the teaching of English language in vocational colleges in China.