Intercultural Understanding Through Role-plays

Foreign language education has experienced significant change in the last twenty years, due to the way language, culture, learning and the relationships among the three are understood. The term culture learning, rather than cultural learning, is frequently used in the literature. Culture learning is integrated with language learning, and culture learning starts on the first day of foreign language learning. Since students'intercultural understanding becomes one of the most important parts in intercultural language teaching classrooms, it is advisable to have a study on it.This research aims at investigating ways of making an intercultural language teaching and learning classroom a place where students undertake their intercultural understanding. The research explores ways of using role-plays to develop student intercultural understanding and ways of assessing student intercultural understanding. In addition, it draws implications for the teaching practice language teachers using the intercultural language teaching and learning approach.The research questions that this study aims to address are:1. How can role-plays be used to promote intercultural understanding in the intercultural language teaching and learning classroom?2. How can intercultural understanding be assessed?3. What are the implications for language teachers using the intercultural language teaching and learning approach?This research is based on the teaching work. The data, which includes student written work, follow-up discussions, student journals, lesson plans and researcher's journals, was collected and analyzed. During the analysis process, data were organized into vignettes to investigate individual students'experience in this research.Findings of this study include:(1) Role-plays can be used in language classrooms to develop student intercultural understanding if designed using the pedagogical principles of intercultural language teaching and learning.(2) Vignettes can be used to record the development of student intercultural understanding and outline students'intercultural journey.(3) Language teachers'intercultural understanding is critical in developing student intercultural understanding.The thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter One Introduction illustrates research background, significance of the current study and the main structure of the whole thesis.Chapter Two Literature Review reviews on the definitions, main approaches and relevant studies at home and abroad.Chapter Three Research Methodology introduces research questions and purposes, subjects, instruments and the procedures of data collection and analyses.Chapter Four Results and Discussion presents the description, interpretation and analysis of the data, and then discusses these research results.Chapter Five Conclusion provides the major findings and implications and points out limitations of present study and suggestions for future studies.