A Survey Of Students’ Perspectives Of English Intercultural Teaching In Vocational School

The rapid development and increasing world economic integration have seen intercultural activities quite often in daily life. Correspondingly, intercultural communicative competence, one of the heated issues in the circle of education not only at home but abroad, plays a more and more important role in the process of acquiring knowledge. Developing students’ intercultural communicative competence has become one of the ultimate objectives of foreign language teaching.According to the teaching syllabus for secondary vocational school, English teaching aims at cultivating students’ skill-applied ability in both daily life and occupational situation, and helping students to understand the difference between Chinese culture and western culture and eventually building up appropriate emotions, attitudes and values. However, in the process of foreign language teaching, the cultivation of students’ intercultural communicative competence has been ignored to some extent.Taking 120 students from four departments of Shijiazhuang Vocational Education Center as a sample group, the researcher made the survey from students’ perspectives on intercultural teaching in vocational school to get an actual understanding of the current situation of students’ intercultural communicative competence and their awareness and attitudes towards intercultural teaching.There are two research questions in this thesis, which are: 1. what is the current situation of students’ intercultural communicative competence in vocational school, 2. what are the students’ awareness and attitudes towards intercultural teaching. To answer the questions, three instruments were employed. The first one is a questionnaire of 42 questions, with the purpose of exploration of students’ self-evaluation on intercultural communicative competence, their awareness and attitudes towards intercultural teaching, and the ways of learning intercultural knowledge. The second one is a test containing 20 items on intercultural communicative competence. The third one is an interview with the purpose of supplementing the findings arising from the questionnaire and the test. The collected data were coded into computer and processed by the software of SPSS of the version 18.0.From the data analysis, it is proved that for the first research question, the students’ intercultural communicative competence is rather low. It is revealed by comparison of the accuracy rate of the test that, on the whole, the students’ intercultural communicative competence of Grade 13 is better than that of Grade 14, the general accuracy rate of students of Arts is higher than that of the students of Science, and the accuracy rate of female students is higher than that of male students. For the second research question, most students agree that cultural study is necessary and important, and the overwhelming majority of participants show great interest in western culture and intercultural communication, but they pay little attention to cultural phenomenon in English learning, and most of them are worried and uncertain about intercultural communication. It is also reflected that English class is the main way for most students to learn intercultural communicative knowledge, but their teachers talk about western culture inadequately in class and there is insufficient information on western culture in the textbooks.Based on the discussion and analysis, the researcher attempts to provide some suggestions to vocational intercultural teaching and further study.