An Intercultural Sensitizer Approach To Maritime English Teaching In China

With the fast development and globalization of the modern shipping industry, thenationalities of merchant vessel crew are more and more diversified. To ensurenavigation safety and efficient communication on board, besides Maritime English,intercultural competence has become one of the prerequisites of modern seafarers inthe increasingly internationalized working environment. However, most marineschools in China still attach importance to the linguistic and communicativecompetence of the students alone in their Maritime English courses and little stress islaid on intercultural aspects. Thereby, to keep up with new requirement to theseafarers’ intercultural competence that the international trend of modern shippingindustry development brings, the author proposes to incorporate interculturalapproaches into Maritime English Teaching (MET), which aims to foster theirintercultural sensitiveness and competence in the process of Maritime Englishlearning and better equip them for their future job.In this thesis, two important concepts of foreign language teaching:communicative competence and intercultural communication are introduced. Theauthor reviews the transformation from communicative competence to ICC in foreignlanguage teaching and elaborates on the importance of intercultural competence.Besides, the concept and aims of intercultural competence training in MET are alsodiscussed as well as theories of the two intercultural approaches applied in MET.This research mainly adopts experimental methodology. Totally65navigationmajor students from Shanghai Maritime Academy participated in this research ofthem constituted the experimental group and the other32form the control group. Theexperiment lasted for three weeks. Before the training, a needs analysis on the part ofnavigation major students, in-service seafarers and Maritime English teachers wasmade, followed by an analysis of the current Maritime English course in severalaspects, so as to set the training aims and the training design which contains sixsessions, each lasting30minutes. The result of the experiment showed that the ICC ofthe students from the experimental group was more significantly improved than that of those from the control group, which proved the effectiveness and feasibility of theintercultural approaches applied in the MET.As the experimental exploration of incorporating an intercultural approach intoMET in China, there are inevitable limitations in this research such as the limitationsof training duration and trainees. The author suggests that in the future research,in-service seafarers and senior navigation major students should be involved in thetraining and that more diversified intercultural approaches be introduced into thisfield.