An Investigation Into Intercultural Communicative Competence Of Students In Senior High School

Enabling the students to communicate with the target language is the main aimfor foreign language teaching and the investigation of students’ ICC (interculturalcommunicative competence) helps the students and teachers to attach more attentionto ICC. Therefore, many researchers focused on the investigation of the whole pictureof ICC of students in a variety of levels. But this thesis tends to focus on thedifferences and similarities of the high school students’ ICC among which those highschools are of different levels.This thesis surveys416students for their ICC in four schools, among whichthere are three urban high schools and one town high school by using the instrumentsof socio-cultural test and interview. It intends to1) investigate the general pattern ofthe high school students’ ICC in China;2) and find out whether there are anydifferences in ICC among students in urban high schools of different levels;3)whether there are any differences in ICC between students in urban high school andtown high school;4)and whether there are any differences in ICC between students inkey-class and non-key class. In addition, this thesis figures out the high schoolstudents’ attitude toward culture learning and their sources of intercultural knowledge.The results of the investigation are as follows:1) The overall ICC of the studentsin urban high school and town high school are all very low;2) There are significantdifferences in ICC among students in urban high schools of different levels;3) Nosignificant differences are detected in ICC between urban high school students andtown high school students;4) There are significant differences in ICC between keyclass students and non-key class students.On the basis of this investigation, the researcher also puts forward somesuggestions for English teaching in high schools, such as introducing foreign teachersto high school English teaching classes, teaching intercultural knowledge in acomparative way, balancing culture-teaching and language teaching and so on.Besides, it is also suggested that the high school English teacher should be responsiblefor improving the high school students’ ICC and their own intercultural knowledgeand teaching skills of culture-teaching. Only on this condition, can high school students improve their ICC and communicate appropriately and effectively in English.