A Study On Application Of ESA Teaching Model Of Intercultural Communicative Competence To Junior High School English Reading Teaching

With the development of international economy,intercultural communication provides significant benefits.As intercultural communicative competence,one aspect of core competences,is put forward by the ministry of education,more emphasis is put on culture education in practical English teaching in senior high school.Some domestic studies about teaching method have confirmed to cultivate intercultural communicative competence in senior high school,but there are a few related researches in junior high school.This study takes the ESA(Engaged,Study and Activated)Teaching Model into the English reading class to cultivate students' intercultural communicative competence in junior high school so as to provide a reference for intercultural teaching of English in junior high school.This study tries to answer the following two research questions:1.What is the current situation of junior high school students' intercultural communicative competence?2.Can English reading teaching cultivate students' intercultural communicative competence under the guidance of ESA Teaching Model(intercultural language knowledge,intercultural awareness and intercultural effectiveness)?In order to respond to above two research questions,the researcher investigated the current situation of junior high school students' intercultural communicative competence through 100 students in Grade Eight at NO.9 Junior High School in Dalateqi,Erdos,Inner Mongolia.Then based on the same text books published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press(2013),the researcher chose 50 students to conduct the experiment to cultivate students' intercultural communicative competence with the ESA Teaching Model while the rest 50 receive the traditional teaching method for 16 weeks.After the experiment,the results of the students' intercultural communicative competence in pretest and post-test were compared from three aspects,namely,intercultural language knowledge,intercultural awareness and intercultural effectiveness.Quantitative and qualitative data-analysis was both used with SPSS22.0.The major conclusions are drawn as follows: 1).According to the investigation,the current situation of junior high school students' intercultural communicative competence is not very optimistic.In detail,students' language ability and the acquisition of intercultural knowledge are all in a low level among six dimensions(M=3.6).And their intercultural awareness and intercultural strategic competence are also notvery high.However,their interaction skills to communicate with others from different cultures are relatively high from the perspective of mean(The highest score is 4.3).Meanwhile,students' attitudes to get more knowledge about the intercultural communicative competence are also high.That is to say,students have a good perception to acquire the knowledge to cultivate their intercultural awareness and communicative competence.2).From the experiment,we know the ESA Teaching Model in English reading class has positive effects on junior high school students' intercultural communicative competence.There existed significant difference of each dimension.Specifically,in terms of intercultural language knowledge,this model has significant effects on students' language ability and intercultural knowledge(P<0.05).In regard to intercultural awareness,students' intercultural attitudes have obvious improved(P<0.01).And students' interaction skills and intercultural strategic competence of intercultural effectiveness were also improved significantly(P<0.05).Some corresponding suggestions to cultivate students' intercultural communicative competence in junior high school are put forward by researcher according to the experimental results,which provides a reference for intercultural teaching for junior high school.Finally,the researcher expounds the limitations of the study and also gives the suggestions for further research.