A Survey On College English Curriculum Design For Cultivating Intercultural Communicative Competence

With the rapid development of globalization, cultivation of students’ interculturalcommunicative competence (ICC) is generally considered as one of the most importanttargets of college English curriculum (CEC), which means a new requirement for thesettings of CEC, however, publications about the correlation between CEC and thecultivation of students’ ICC remain unavailable. The present research investigates into thefeatures of students’ ICC and the settings of CEC, devoting to make an empirical survey intothe correlation between the two parts, three research questions have been identified:(1)What are the strong points and weak points of college students’ ICC respectively？(2)Which parts of ICC have been put more emphasis on by current CEC?(3) Which courses ofcurrent CEC contribute most to the development of ICC?350students，10teachers who have been engaged in related research of ICC，and10teachers of CEC are involved in this survey, student’s questionnaire is based on the ICCself-report scale (Zhong, Bai&Fan,2013), aiming at making surveys into the characteristicsof students’ ICC; Teacher’s questionnaire is based on the guide of CEC from HuazhongUniversity of Science and Technology, aiming at evaluating the correlation between currentCEC and the development of students’ ICC; and course teachers’ interview is adopted toreinforce the results of teachers’ questionnaire.After a detailed analysis of the data, the author finds that students’ ICC ranges in amiddle level, as it is shown in statistics, students’ intercultural attitudes and interculturalawareness are ranked in the first place, linguistic competence and intercultural knowledgeare the two parts which score the lowest, current CEC covers all of the ICC parts withdifferent emphasis, it focuses the most on linguistic competence, and sociolinguisticcompetence, strategic competence and intercultural knowledge follow, however, theintercultural attitudes, intercultural awareness, and intercultural skills, which are closelyrelated to ICC have not get as much attention as they deserve.Based on these findings, the thesis comes up with some tentative suggestions forthe settings of CEC. Meanwhile, the limitations of this research are pointed out and the suggestions for future research are put forward.