Classroom-oriented Research In High School Teachers' Intercultural Teaching Competence-A Case Study

Teachers' intercultural teaching competence not only requires them to have good intercultural communicative competence but also enables them to carry out effective classroom teaching. This ability is usually reflected in various aspects, such as the selecting and designing of teaching content and teaching plan, and effective teaching procedures.Based on the theories of correlation between language and culture, intercultural teaching,and with the approach of intercultural teaching research, this thesis adopts the method of quantitative and qualitative research, combined with classroom observation, questionnaire and semi-open interviews to collect data. It is a case study based on the English teachers'classroom teaching of a four-star high school, aimed at exploring high school teachers'intercultural teaching competence in classrooms. Following three questions are explored:(1) What is the teachers' general cognition of intercultural teaching competence? (2) How do the teachers integrate their intercultural awareness into the instructional process and classroom teaching? (3) To what extent are the teachers capable of both capturing and coping with students' intercultural needs in foreign language cognition.The answers to these three questions are briefly as follows: firstly, they regard intercultural teaching in the simplistic way to teach culture and cultivate students'intercultural communicative competence but not consider the instructional process in a holistic way; secondly, teachers, intercultural awareness is relatively vague. They are not able to teach culture explicitly and purposefully with integrating intercultural awareness into the instructional process and classroom teaching; finally, roughly they do not take the relationship between language form and cultural connotation substantially and quite often unable to handle students' pragmatic failure properly. Some of them have difficulties in capturing students' intercultural needs and feedback, and their guiding and mentoring is usually vague and general. Therefore, it can be inferred that teachers' intercultural teaching competence is a big concern both for teachers' professional development and effective language teaching. To lessen the concern, both the in-service training of teachers and pedagogical education should consider the following two aspects: teachers should update their conception of intercultural teaching and improve their intercultural teaching awareness; they should horn their intercultural teaching ability in all aspects and grasp the inherent correlation between the language form and cultural connotation to better capture and respond to the needs of the students.