The Investigation Of Rural Primary Students’ English Intercultural Communication Competence

With the promotion of opening and reform in China, communication with foreign countries is more frequent than ever. Therefore, people with intercultural communicative competence are in greater need. According to English Curriculum Standard (2011), the overall objective of English teaching is to help students to develop their communicative competence and abilities to use language appropriately. Consequently, the cultivation of students’ intercultural communicative competence in primary schools is now becoming one of the most important teaching objectives. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the present domestic research on intercultural competence still focuses on the study on college students; the related studies on primary school students are still rare.The study aims to investigate the present condition of intercultural communicative competence of primary school students. The study instruments include questionnaires. The subjects of the study include192students from3rural primary schools in Longwen District of Zhangzhou and10English teachers from Longwen rural primary schools. Through the data analysis, this study holds that rural primary school students didn’t acquire enough intercultural communication knowledge and lacked intercultural awareness. One reason is that teachers themselves lack enough intercultural communication knowledge, and the other is that the exams rarely involve cultural contents. The culture teaching didn’t get enough attention.