Effect Of Contrast Teaching Of Chinese And Western Cultures On College Students' Intercultural Communication Competence

In China, with the increase in the communication with foreigners, educators gradually found that pure language teaching which lack of intercultural teaching cannot meet the needs of the students' intercultural communication. And many experts and scholars believe that the main goal of foreign language teaching(FLT) is the development of intercultural communication competence(ICC). Intercultural communication refers to the communication between people with different cultural background. Moreover, it means the communication through the same kind of language(mother tongue or target language) in the specific situation. That is to say, intercultural communication is an equal and two-way exchange of different cultures. People's knowledge on native culture and target culture both contribute to the intercultural communication. Therefore, ICC includes communicative competence and intercultural competence.There are many methods of intercultural teaching. Contrast method, as a way of second language learning, has been discussed and applied in intercultural teaching as well. The author of this thesis tries to explore whether the intercultural teaching through contrast method has any effect on the college students' ICC by an empirical research on English teaching from Northwest Normal University. The author mainly studies the following three questions:(1)What is the general level of ICC of college students in NWNU?(2)What are students' perspectives on intercultural teaching?(3)Can students' ICC be improved by contrast teaching of Chinese and Western cultures in college English class? 37 non-English major college sophomores are the subjects. The author conducts the experiment by contrast teaching of Chinese and western cultures. Research instruments are pre-test, post-test, questionnaires and interview. The descriptive statistics and Paired Samples T-test are collected by the SPSS 17.0. The results are following:(1) The general level of ICC of College students in NWNU is poor.(2) Students are in great willingness to accept intercultural teaching in English class. But they cannot learn enough intercultural knowledge from their teachers and textbook. And their intercultural self-learning ability is low.(3) Students' ICC can be improved by contrast teaching of Chinese and Western cultures in college English class.Based on the study, the author has the following suggestions for college English intercultural teaching: Design intercultural teaching syllabus; Add cultural difference in textbooks; Make good use of contrast teaching to improve students' ICC; And complete the examination and evaluation system.