Study On Students’ Cultivation Of Cross-cultural Communicative Competence At Vocational Level

There is no denial that those who are acquiring a foreign language need to have agood command of the socio-linguistic and pragmatic rules of the target language.Linguistic accuracy in a foreign language should be learned, but a learner needs toachieve functional abilities in the second language as well. It is imperative to learnhow to understand and use language that is appropriate to the situations in which oneis functioning, employing the proper illocutionary patterns in accordance with thesocio-cultural parameters of the specific situation, because failure to do so may causethe participants of interaction to miss key points that are being communicated ineither the written or the oral language, or have the messages misunderstood. Worse isthe possibility of a total communication breakdown and the labeling of the foreignlanguage users as people who are insensitive, rude, or inept. Therefore, culturalliteracy should not be taken as something with little significance, or, just the “fifthskill” in language acquisition, rather it should be considered an inseparable part thatpermeates the whole process of language teaching and learning.Needless to say, the work on culture learning and teaching is important and needsto continue to emphasize because nowadays it is universally acknowledged that inorder to enhance learner’s development of tolerance and understanding of othercultures, it is imperative to integrate target culture teaching into foreign languagelearning. However, only a minimal amount of research has been carried out on theprocess and extent to which language learners are able to acquire, in the sense ofappropriateness, another culture. And little is addressed to classroom instructors whoneed to devise and implement practical teaching strategies for their students for thesake of cultural awareness and cultural competence. So the goal of this paper is not topresent new approach to teaching culture dimensions, but based on a series oftheoretical cultural studies made by some linguists and anthropologists such as Hymes,Gumperz, Austin, and Searle, and combining with the present author’s cultural teaching experience in the foreign language classroom for non-English majors, theauthor tends to provide concrete cultural teaching ideas to those who are unsure ofhow to incorporate culture factors into their regular instructional programs by fullyexploring various aspects concerning cultural teaching—its necessity, feasibility,contents, resources, and methodology as well.This study first conducts an investigation by way of questionnaire with thepurpose of probing the present situation of college students’ cultural literacy atvocational level, and then, a pre-test is given to the students to test their culturalawareness for the sake of comparison with the later post-test. Thereafter, the classteaching of cultural literacy experiment is carried out which lasts a semester. At theend of semester, a post-test is conducted to see the teaching result. Maybe it is a littleearly to say that this tentative teaching experiment is successful because the teachingduration is only a semester, but the teaching result is obvious and satisfactory. In oneway, seen from the perspective of classroom activity, the students more or lessdevelop their cultural awareness and competence because the teacher can observe thatthey are used to considering questions from cultural aspects rather than only focusingon linguistic skills. In another, compared with the pre-test result, the post-testachievement is much better and more satisfactory. In addition, when the teacherdiscusses the matter with students, they give their positive response to the teachingexperiment, and they express their sense of achievement by taking part in suchactivity.This is a tentative study and if one really wants to conduct cross-culturalteaching, furtheer research and practice are needed. To the present author’s knowledge,to design a cross-cultural course is urgent at present, because just integrating culturalinformation into language class does have its weakness and disadvantage. The mostserious one would be the unsystematic mastery of a foreign culture and therefore thestudents tend to be over-general or over-simplistic. So the author firmly believes that it will be beneficial for the students if they have a cultural course which covers the“wholeness” of the target culture.