Development Of Intercultural Communication Competence For Independent College Students Through Cooperative Learning Approach

With the popularization and use of English, how to learn English well and teach English well are becoming problems attracting growing concern among domestic English educators and scholars. Since the year2000, with the development of higher education, the first independent colleges began to appear, with more and more students having the opportunities to enroll in. However, the setback in current domestic college English teaching is that of students’ poor English proficiency, with little understanding of English culture, especially for independent college students, whose knowledge of English culture is only confined to the "Valentine’s Day" and "Christmas" and so on.It is rooted in that the current domestic traditional cultural teaching mode makes college English teaching isolated from cultural teaching. Therefore, students do not have the strong desire to learn and touch more cultural differences, which in turn, further affects their competence in intercultural communication.In most college English classes, teacher is the center of the entire classroom, while students are passive learners receiving knowledge from teacher about English cultures. But culture is a relatively broad concept, which can not be mastered merely through teacher’s teaching in class.As an independent college English teacher, the author tries to find a suitable mode beneficial both for the teacher and students in cultural learning. Numerous studies have shown that cooperative learning is a very effective teaching method, which can significantly improve students’ academic achievements and inspire students’ interest in learning.In this case, the author applies the cooperative learning approach to teaching practice, selecting two classes of students in Jianghuai College of Anhui University. The total number of these students is101. They are all freshmen and non-English majors, who help the author conduct an experiment during a semester of16weeks. In the process of teaching practice, the author tries to find answers to the following questions: (1)Will there be any significant effects of cooperative learning on Students in independent college or not?(2)Will the subjects in the experimental class perform better than their counterparts in the control class in understanding English culture as well as in increasing interest in English learning after a term’s training on cooperative learning approach or not?By teaching experiment, collecting data from questionnaire on students’attitudes toward cooperative learning, and data from tests, the author has found that cooperative learning approach has a significant role in promoting students’ intercultural competence for independent college. In other words, students have the flexibility and competence to fit in a variety of social and cultural environment. They develop a vision and insight into the same aspects and different aspects between diverse cultures and lifestyles concerning the mode of thinking. As a result, they achieve the three objectives of intercultural communicative competence. Firstly, they achieve the aim of establishing and maintaining relationships with others. Secondly, they manage to minimize misinterpretation in communication. Thirdly, they try to cooperate with others for the common good and the needs of shared benefits. However, due to the author’s limited time and proficiency, this teaching experiment is done merely based on the statistics from the independent college students. The results may not be appropriate for the students with good foundation and framework of Englishin in some other prestigious universities. But the author does hope this study may be of help for future studies on English intercultural teaching in independent colleges.