Cultivating Students’Cultural Empathy Competence Through College English Reading

Cultural empathy means that in intercultural communication, the communicator consciously and willingly shifts from one’s own cultural frame of reference and actively projects oneself in another cultural pattern, feeling, understanding and appreciating another culture, without abandoning one’s own perspective on the situation (Gao Yongchen,2003). With the development of globalization, intercultural communication is becoming an indispensable part of people’s daily life. Only through cultural empathy can both sides communicate effectively in intercultural communication. So cultural empathy competence directly affects intercultural communication.The final aim of learning a second language is to use the target language to achieve successful intercultural communication with its native speakers. The new College English Curriculum Requirement issued by the Ministry of Education in2007clearly sets the teaching aim of college English teaching as "to develop students’ ability to use English in a well-rounded way, especially in listening and speaking" and regards intercultural communication as one of the main teaching contents of college English. Thus to achieve the teaching aim of college English and optimize its teaching effect, it is essential for teachers to cultivate and improve students’ cultural empathy competence.As a basic language skill, reading plays a very important role in language learning and in people’s daily life. Reading classes account for the largest proportion in all the kinds of classes set by college English curriculum, which provides guarantee for teachers to cultivate and improve students’ cultural empathy competence in reading classes. Reading is in fact a process in which the reader communicates with the writer. So cross-cultural reading is undoubtedly a kind of intercultural communication. Whether the cultivation and improvement of students’ cultural empathy competence can be helpful to the improvement of their reading comprehension arouses the interest of the academic world.This thesis has explored the possible ways to cultivate and improve students’cultural empathy competence through a seven-month-long teaching experiment during which the teacher adopted different teaching methods in the control class and the experimental class. Through the social-cultural and reading pre-and post-test and questionnaire and the data collected from these tests, it has also proved the significantly positive correlation between students’ cultural empathy competence and their reading comprehension and that students’ reading comprehension can be improved through the cultivation and improvement of their cultural empathy competence. The creativeness of this thesis lies in the combination of cultivating and improving students’ cultural empathy competence and reading teaching and that it has proved the positive correlation between cultural empathy competence and reading comprehension through the experiment and data.Through the research, the author hopes to bring some enlightenment to college English teaching:college English teaching reform should reform not only the teaching methods but also the content of teaching and developing students’ abilities. In college English teaching, teachers should attach great importance to the cultivation and improvement of students’ cultural empathy competence, constantly explore the effective ways to do so in order to guarantee the smooth realization of the college English teaching aim and the optimization of the teaching effect.