An Action Research On Cultivating Intercultural Awareness And Improving Intercultural Communicative Competence Of Vocational College Students

Foreign language teaching research shows that cultural differences have an important influence on foreign language teaching.However,English teaching in higher vocational college has its own characteristics because of the particularity of students,the empirical study of culture teaching in vocational college is still rare.As an English teacher of higher vocational college,the author finds that the vocational students have a weak sense of cultural differences,which seriously affects students' acquisition of target language and restricts the development of their intercultural communicative competence.Students can not communicate properly with foreigners in class or in life.In view of the present situation,the author took an action research and tried to solve the following two research questions.One is how to cultivate the intercultural awareness of vocational students step by step? Try to make them to pay attention to and accumulate knowledge of cultural differences in the learning process.The other is how to use intercultural awareness to improve the intercultural communicative competence of vocational college students.Through the observation and reflection of my own class,the author set up the research questions and carries out a one-year action research.The object of this research is a class of tourism management students in a vocational college of this city,with a total of 43 students.In the first stage of action intervention,according to the normal teaching task,the author supplemented the extracurricular cultural knowledge for the students according to the unit theme in order to broaden their horizons.Then,the author selected the real cultural conflict events or cases related to the theme for students to discuss and reflect on the impact of cultural differences in small groups and they were led to establish a reflective journal.The author extracted text data from the reflective journal to do the qualitative data analysis.Through the first round of action intervention,the students had a positive attitude towards target culture,their intercultural awareness has been preliminarily cultivated.The author made two cross-cultural communicative competence questionnaires.Aiming to test the communicative competence,the author tested the students' intercultural communicative competence in volume A of college students.In the face of cultural conflict,students' actual communicative competence was still insufficient.After reflection by the author,it was because the tasks in the classroom were set artificially and could not arouse the students' real emotion,so we needed the real situation to stimulate the students' intercultural awareness by making it more proactive to learn from intercultural differences or language expressions.Based on this,the author and other teachers,foreign teachers and foreign students carried out practical classes together,which provide a real scene of communication activities to the students and make the students feel the difference between culture and values.At the end of the second stage of action intervention,the author tested the students' intercultural communicative competence with volume B and the results showed that the students' intercultural communication competence has been improved and this action research achieved a better result.As a researcher of the action research,the author has deepened the understanding of intercultural teaching.After reflection,the most touching aspect in intercultural teaching is that language teaching and cultural teaching should always complement each other.It is an important measure to improve students' intercultural communication competence by cultivate students' intercultural awareness of higher vocational English teaching.Teaching is endless,teachers need to explore teaching methods and adapt to it.