A Study Of Intercultural Teaching Strategies From A Intercultural Sensitivity Perspective

With the development of science and technology,the world has been showing the trend of globalization.The exchange and interflow in economy,politics and culture among nations are becoming more and more frequent.As a result,intercultural communication cannot be ignored.People from different cultural backgrounds,with different value orientations and different ways of thinking may encounter massive barriers in their communication with others.Raising the intercultural awareness and competence might help to make their communication smoother.The purpose of the present study is to attract more attentions and dig it deeper in the field of intercultural communication via providing some theoretical reference and practical application for intercultural communication scholars and Chinese as foreign language teachers.The present study is carried out among Grades 3,4 and 5 overseas students of an international school,aiming at answering the following three research questions:(1)What is the status quo of the intercultural sensitivity of overseas elementary students in China?(2)What are the relationships between the factors of intercultural sensitivity?(3)What are the teaching strategies of improving students' intercultural sensitivity?The research tools of the present study are questionnaires and interviews.Data obtained from the questionnaires are processed in SPSS 22.0 and the content of the interviews is classified,discussed and summarized.The results exhibit that:Firstly,those overseas students in Chinese elementary school have a high level of intercultural sensitivity,among which their interaction confidence ranks the first and respect for cultural difference ranks the last.Secondly,the correlation coefficient analysis reveals that the factors are mainly positively correlated.Respect for cultural differences and interaction enjoyment have relatively strong correlation.There are significant middle positive correlations among all the other factors.However,the correlation between interaction confidence and interaction attentiveness is an exception.Finally,some strategies of literacy,assessment,cultural empathy and engagements employed in intercultural teaching are proposed with the hope to contribute a little to the intercultural communication teaching and relevant study.