Research On Intercultural Awareness Cultivation From The Perspective Of Educational Communication

As globalization continues to deepen,talents with intercultural awareness and competence become more and more demanding.Intercultural awareness is the foundation and core of intercultural competence,but the cultivation of intercultural awareness is a long-term and phased process.In our country,college English teaching is the main front for cultivating non-English major students' intercultural awareness,but most of the college English textbooks mainly focus on cultures of English speaking countries.Most domestic researches are done from the perspectives of linguistics and English language teaching and there are relatively few studies targeting on intercultural awareness cultivation of non-English majors in private colleges.On the other hand,Internet has broken the boundaries between senders and recipients in communication activities.In the context of educational communication,both teachers and students can obtain rich resources from the Internet and become senders and recipients of educational information at the same time.Therefore,the author proposes to study intercultural awareness cultivation from the perspective of educational communication and probes deeper into intercultural communication,intercultural training,educational communication and gatekeeping theory in communication with the method of literature research.It proves that intercultural training skills can also be applied into college English lessons.If teachers and students can make appropriate use of Internet and do well in gatekeeping and self-gatekeeping in the process of education communication,it would be more conducive to the cultivation of intercultural awareness.A new cultivation strategy based on the Internet and college English teaching,which learns from the critical incidents technique in intercultural training,is proposed aiming at non-English majors in private colleges with the specific objective of the second level in intercultural awareness.In order to verify the feasibility of this strategy,the author adopts the methods of focus group interview and in-depth interview to investigate on seven groups of forty-eight students of different majors and grades and six college English teachers with different years of teaching experience from X College,a private college in Baoding City to obtain their real attitudes and true opinions.Then,the method of categorization is conducted to collate and analyze the data.The analysis shows that although both teachers and students in X college can discover the cultural information implied in the two online videos as critical incidents,the implementation of the strategy may be affected by some realistic factors: personal motivation on the side of students while the teacher's side including factors such as school management,students' response,and personal reasons..This research is to some extent innovative to propose a new training strategy from the perspective of educational communication.And the proposed strategy has certain feasibility in empirical research.And suggestions from three aspects of schools,teachers and students are put forward on intercultural awareness cultivation of non-English majors in private colleges.This study is a useful attempt and supplement to the research of intercultural awareness cultivation of non-English majors in private colleges in China.Besides,there are also some limitations in this research,such as relatively few samples and researcher's impact on interviewees.