A Study Of The Cultivation Of Intercultural Communication Competence In College English Class

The intercultural communication competence is becoming increasingly indispensable for English learners in Chinese universities owning to the high demand from the rapidly globalizing world. The development of college English students’ ICC through English teaching has attracted great interest of scholars of intercultural communication and foreign language teaching. However, the previous researches either focused on the English majors’ ICC, or concentrated on a specific element that constitutes ICC, or reviewed and commented on various ICC-related theories. Seldom do they investigate both the current situation of the non-English majors’ ICC, their assessment of ICC cultivation in College English class as well as the College English teachers’general understanding of ICC and the importance that they have attached to ICC cultivation in their teaching methodologies. The author of this thesis therefore attempts to look into these issues so as to find out the deficiency of the ICC cultivation in English teaching in Chinese universities and to propose some constructive pedagogic implications.363non-English majors and33College English teachers from a key university in Shanghai were selected as subjects. Three research instruments were employed, namely the sociocultural test, students’ ICC questionnaire, and College English teachers’ ICC questionnaire. Wang Zhenya’s version of sociocultural test was adopted to examine current situation of non-English majors’ ICC. And the two ICC questionnaires were designed based on Michael Byram’s framework of ICC and the author’s class observation in an attempt to evaluate subjects’understanding of ICC and explore the possible problems in the development of ICC in College English class. With the SPSS16.0, both quantitive and qualitative research methods were exploited to process and analyze the collected data.The analysis results indicate that although the vast majority of students have realized the importance of ICC, their ICC is still quite low and does not have prominent connection with their English proficiency. Meanwhile, the College English teachers have adequate knowledge of ICC in a broad sense, yet they lay little importance to developing students’intercultural communication skills in class. In addition, both the students and the teachers denote their demand for more improvements to the cultivation of ICC in College English class. On the basis of these findings, the author of the research provides a few constructive suggestions for the College English class.