A Case Study On Junior Middle School Students' Intercultural Communicative Competence In Urban Area Of Chengdu

The concept of intercultural communication has appeared in China for decades since it was mentioned for the first time.As the world becomes more and more globalized,countries are increasingly required to cultivate talents with high intercultural communication skills to conduct cultural exchanges and communication.In current intercultural communication,cultural misunderstandings,cultural barriers and even cultural conflicts happen occasionally.How to achieve success in intercultural communication has raised great concern of the educators and developing students' intercultural communicative competence(ICC)has become an important goal of foreign language teaching.However,in practical teaching,due to various reasons such as the tendency of exam-oriented education,intercultural teaching is often marginalized in middle schools,and it isn't received enough attention from teachers as well as students.Although many studies in the past have focused on the cultivation of intercultural communicative competence,most of them pay attention to the education stage of college students or high school students.For this situation,the thesis investigated the intercultural communicative competence of junior middle school students,and conducted a comparative study on ICC of junior middle school students between a foreign language school which specialises in English and a non-foreign language middle school to provide some references for ICC cultivation.The thesis is based on the Byram's theory of intercultural communicative competence,combining Kramsch's perspective of cultural diversity interaction and developmental assessment theory to analyse the information which is collected by class observation,questionnaires,interviews and socio-cultural test.It is about the current situation of 202 junior middle school students' ICC,as well as 20 English teachers' teaching attitude and methods towards ICC from the two schools.The results show that there are significant differences between foreign language school students' ICC and non-foreign language school students' ICC.Besides,the cultivation of ICC between the two schools is different in terms of teaching materials,extracurricular teaching activities and assessments.On the whole,junior middle school students need to improve their ICC level and intercultural communication awareness.English teachers should also improve their intercultural teaching ability and enrich intercultural communication teaching methods.The thesis provided a reference for future research.