An Investigation Into Intercultural Communicative Competence Of Senior Middle School Students

In the past decades,China has witnessed vast social and economical changes,and the communication between Chinese people and foreigners has increased rapidly.Such communication is facilitated by the new technology and the modern media.However,for a long time,English teaching in China is dominated by the training of students' linguistic competence in such areas as grammar,pronunciation and vocabulary.Furthermore,English education in China is examination-orientated,but student's intercultural communicative competence is usually neglected.Facing such a situation of English teaching,English teachers in China have been attempting to improve their ways of teaching English and endeavoring to enhance students' intercultural communicative competence.The aim of the study was to investigate the students' overall intercultural communicative competence(ICC)in a senior middle school.It aimed at exploring the differences in ICC between the high proficiency and low proficiency students and examining the differences in ICC between the male and female students.The research methodology used in this thesis consisted of qualitative and quantitative approaches,so as to gain comprehensive data of students' ICC.In the quantitative study,the researcher randomly distributed a social cultural test paper to 150 senior middle school students.In the qualitative study,interviews were conducted for 10 English teachers and 20 students.Each of them was asked to answer 5 questions respectively.The data collected in the socio-cultural test was analyzed by SPSS 17.0.The analysis of the data in this study revealed a number of major findings.First,senior middle school student's overall ICC is weak in general and their ICC develops unevenly.On the whole,students perform better at small “c” culture than big “C”culture,and students' verbal communication competence is better than their non-verbal communication competence.Secondly,the high English proficiency students perform better than the low English proficiency students,and there exist significant differences in ICC between the high English proficiency students and the low English proficiency students.Finally,there is no significant difference in ICC between male and female students,but female students gets a little higher score than male students in the socio-cultural test.Based on the findings above,the study offered a number of implications forcultivating students' ICC:(1)English teachers should reform the current testing system and design some items in an examination paper to test student's cultural knowledge and communicative competence;(2)Teachers should organize some activities outside classroom to develop students' ICC;(3)Teachers should develop their students' ICC in classroom teaching by using intercultural training models and intercultural training techniques,such as role play and case study;(4)Teachers should use some suitable teaching materials,such as cultural related articles and novels in language teaching so as to help students increase their ICC.