A Survey Of Intercultural Communicative Competence Of Senior High School Students Of Huanggang Municipal City

With the in-depth development of economic globalization, culture exchangesbetween different countries become more and more frequent. As a result, the issue thathow to make successful intercultural communication (IC) has drawn people’s attention.So the cultivation of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has become one ofthe most important goals of foreign language teaching. The New English CurriculumStandard also clearly states that one of the most important goals of foreign languageeducation is to develop the ICC of students. In order to learn about the actual situation ofthe ICC of senior high school students under the background of the New EnglishCurriculum Standard and the factors that influence the ICC of senior high school students,the author made a survey of the ICC of students in four senior high schools inHuanggang.The research adopts the method of testing to investigate ICC of second-yearstudents and the method of questionnaire to investigate the teachers’ attitudes towardsintercultural communication and their actual teaching of intercultural knowledge in thefour schools. Results show that the ICC of the students who participated in theinvestigation is generally low and the teachers are not very actively concerned aboutintercultural communication education in their daily English teaching. This is mainly dueto:1) influence of students’ ethnocentrism on their intercultural communicativeawareness (ICA);2) effects of negative transfer of students’ native culture;3) lack ofEnglish cultural knowledge;4) insufficient training of intercultural communication.According to the analysis of the research results，the author would like to make thefollowing suggestions:1) Teachers should strengthen their intercultural communicationteaching competence;2) Students ought to make great efforts to overcome the impact ofnegative transfer of native culture;3) Test items of intercultural knowledge are supposedto be increased in College Entrance Examination;4) Intercultural communicationknowledge (ICK) materials should be added to the textbooks;5) Teachers should creategood environment for student’s intercultural learning. We should make efforts to explore the successful model of ICC training of senior high school students.This thesis is comprised of eight parts. Chapter One is a brief introductionincluding the background information, purpose and significance of the research aswell as research methodologies and organization of this thesis. Chapter Two reviewsthe related literature in this field both at home and abroad. Chapter Three interprets thetheoretical framework of the research. Chapter Four describes the research designmeticulously. Chapter Five mainly analyzes the results of the students’ test and teachers’questionnaire, and observes the teaching situations of intercultural communication inclass, through which the author researches and analyzes senior high school students’understanding of the English culture as well as their ICC. Chapter Six makes a detailedanalysis of the results of the students’ test, teachers’ questionnaire and classroomobservation, basing on the results obtained in Chapter Five. Chapter Seven puts forwardsome workable proposals which are based on the problems in English teaching inintercultural education in senior high school. Chapter Eight is the last part as well as theconclusion part. It also includes the limitations of this research and involves the issueswhich need further exploring.