The Assessment And Fostering Of Senior High School Students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence

The past three decades has witnessed China’s opening to the world in a wide range of aspects, which brings about increasing activities of the intercultural communication between Chinese and people from other countries. In addition, globalization has also accelerated the frequency of intercultural communication among different nations; gradually, a nation becomes part of the global village. However, the existence of the differences between nations such as the differences in ecology, religion, custom inevitably becomes a great barrier when people communicate with each other. To surmount the barriers and differences occurred in the process of intercultural communication requires EFL teachers should not only pay attention to improving the senior high school students’basic language ability, but also develop their intercultural communication competence. In order to meet the demand of intercultural communication, English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School has raised a higher requirement for Chinese senior high school students to acquire intercultural communicative competence. Therefore, there has been an increasing attention to integrating teaching language and culture in FLT (Foreign Language Teaching), and teachers are becoming more aware of the importance of teaching beyond’background studies’(UK)’civilization’(France) i.e. not only teaching information to students about the language which is spoken, but also emphasizing on raising their interest in intercultural knowledge, which has also led to the emphasis on the need to assess cultural learning. This paper focuses on the research on the assessment and awareness of senior high school students’ cross-cultural communicative competence by means of questionnaires Based on Byram (1997)’s model of ICC. And corresponding analysis was carried out on the data collected from the information of the result of questionnaires. The writer also suggests some measures and approaches to cultivate the senior high school students’intercultural communicative competence based on the result of data analysis so that the students can acquire the competence to express themselves in a proper, accurate way, at the same time, avoid some misunderstanding and embarrassment resulting from the cultural differences. Besides, fostering senior high school students’ICC will, in turn, benefit their English learning.