Cultivating College Students' Intercultural Communicative Competence Through Culture Teaching

The development of language teaching theory, as well as the ever-increasing requirement of intercultural communication and the rapid process of globalization, requires that the ultimate goal of English teaching is to cultivate students'intercultural communicative competence (ICC for short hereafter) with English language. Thus English teaching should not only emphasize the training of students'basic linguistic skills but also put these skills into the context of its culture so that the students can acquire ICC.Recently how to enhance students'cultural awareness in order to develop their ICC has become a most important project in the reforming of college English teaching in China. A lot of experts, scholars and teachers have paid special attention to these researches and have published related works and articles, which form the basic systems concerned with the study of intercultural communication. However, how to develop college students'cultural awareness in order to improve their ICC is still a field which is worth further study.The research questions of this thesis are 1) What is the current situation of the students'intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence? 2) Which method of cultural teaching can cultivate college students'intercultural communicative competence? All the work of this thesis is done so as to answer these two questions. The author of this thesis conducted an experiment in a period of a semester on the basis of some relevant theories she discusses in Chapter Two. She organized two socio-cultural tests and a questionnaire to students in order to make clear what the current situation of their intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence is. The findings from the experiment prove that the strategies which are proposed in Chapter Two, such as culture discussions, role-plays, culture lectures, video films watching and internet surfing, are effective and practical. It is concluded that these strategies are feasible and effective in cultivating college students'awareness and in improving their ICC. The author holds the hope that culture teaching in CET can be promoted by college English teachers'proper use of these strategies.