An Empirical Study On The Role Of Utilizing English Newspapers To Cultivate The English Intercultural Communicative Competence Of Higher Vocational Students

The trend of globalization enhances the intercultural communication between various parts of the globe and highlights the significance of cultivating intercultural communication. Yet, surveys among higher vocational students indicated that their intercultural communicative competence was at a quite low level and their instruction seemed ineffective, rendering it essential to research how to improve the teaching effect of intercultural communication in higher vocational colleges. Since 1960s, scholars at home and abroad have done a plethora of studies on the concept and components of intercultural communicative competence and put forth some suggestions about utilizing English newspapers as a teaching aid. This paper tried to investigate the effects of reading English newspapers on the cultivation of intercultural communicative competence in a vocational college.Based on Krashen’s Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis, Affective Filter Hypothesis and Input Hypothesis, the paper examined the following two questions:1) Can English newspaper-aided reading instruction help students improve their intercultural communication competence?2) From what aspects does English newspaper reading affect students’intercultural communication learning?Two intact classes in Grade 2012 of Hunan Vocational College for Nationalities were chosen as participants, one as the experimental group and the other the control group. In the one-year session of the experiment, students in the experimental class were asked to read some materials from English newspapers and those in the control class were not. Data were then collected before and after the experiment by means of questionnaires, pre- and post-test, and interview, yielding the following research findings:1) Utilizing English newspapers as an aid in English intercultural communication classes can improve students’ intercultural communicative competence to a certain extent; 2) Utilizing English newspapers as reading materials can improve students’intercultural communicative competence in three different aspects:intercultural knowledge, skill and awareness. The results clearly show that the approach adopted is effective in improving students’intercultural communicative competence.The study is limited in the choice of the participants and the teaching materials. Therefore, future research can focus on issues concerning how to choose appropriate reading materials.