An Experimental Study On Cultivating Senior High School Students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence Based On Schema Theory

With the rapid development of economy, technology and society, intercultural communication between people from different nations and countries become more and more frequent. People find only when they understand the cultural connotation of a language can people understand the real meaning of a language and succeed in international communication.Therefore intercultural communicative awareness and intercultural communicative competence were put forward in the National English Curriculum in 2003. To meet such a requirement, many experiments have been done in senior high school English teaching. This thesis contributes more evidences to find out whether the Schema-based reading teaching can improve students’ intercultural communicative awareness, intercultural communicative competence and reading ability.The experiment in this study was carried out in a senior high school and 81 students in Grade11 from two parallel classes were taken as participants. The researcher randomly chooses one class as the experimental class and the other as the control class. Firstly students were given Questionnaire One and Questionnaire Two which were used to prove whether students’ intercultural communicative awareness and intercultural communicative competence have similar level before the experiment. Then students were given pre-test of reading to test students’ reading ability in both classes were similar before the experiment. During the experiment, the experimental class used the Schema-based reading teaching approach and the control class used the traditional reading teaching approach. After the experiment, postquestionnaires and post-test were used in both classes. The data from the experiment was analyzed with SPSS.The main findings of the study are as follows: Senior high school students’ intercultural communicative awareness and intercultural communicative competence are weak. They do not know much about the objectives of these two aspects in the National English Curriculum.Their attention were mainly focus on grammar points, words, phrases and sentence structures in order to get a high score. The Schema-based reading teaching can improve students’ intercultural communicative awareness, intercultural communicative competence and reading ability. Besides most students learn intercultural communicative knowledge through teacher’steaching in class, so it is important for teachers to teach related knowledge in class as much as possible.According to the result of this experiment, Schema-based reading teaching is more effective than the traditional reading teaching in cultivating students’ intercultural communicative awareness, intercultural communicative competence and reading ability. So teachers in senior high schools are suggested to use the Schema-based reading teaching.