On Strategies To Cultivate ESL Learners' Cross-cultural Communicative Competence In Hotel Service English Teaching

In the mingling-cultured age, the contact and cooperation of different cultures have brought about new ways of life. Cultural differences are inevitable and may cause misunderstanding and even conflicts in the course of cross-cultural communication.With the implementation of reform and open policy, and the success of entering WTO and the success of application for the host of 2008 Olympic Games, our country has had much more international activities. All walks of life, including tourism and business are striving to keep abreast with international standards. As the travelers' families, hotels, whose services and facilities are the self-reflection of the social culture, are windows into a country or district, a place where people fi'om different cultures carry out friendly communication. Thus, in a sense, hotels are places which bring in both the native and foreign cultures to form its own identical culture. Meanwhile, hotels provide and spread cultures through the hotel staffs and the guests or tourists.Increasing international communication has lead to an increasingly high demand of hotel service. Thus, it is quite necessary for us to study Hotel Service English Teaching(HSET) with the background of cross-cultural communication.However, influenced by traditional English teaching model, it is taken for granted that the English learning is a process of mastering the pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax and so on. For this reason, the ESL(English as a second language)learners more or less ignore the cultural knowledge of the country or the district of the target language, which often results in the inappropriate use of the English language during the real cross-cultural communicative situation, such as hotel service. As a result, communicative conflicts may arise and pragmatic failure may happen..As is known to us, the major purpose of conducting HSET in our country is to develop the learners' communicative competence in hotel service. English teachers should give their students more insights to the cross-cultural communicative knowledge and help them develop their cross-cultural communicative competence. Based on the purpose, we have made probe into strategies of conducting HSET with the background of cross-cultural communication. We hold that in the cross-cultural communication, HSET should follow principles of cognition, assimilation, comparison , tolerance and politeness. Thus, we have also discussed HSET strategies to improve students' English communication competence.Besides the introduction and conclusion, this paper consists of four chapters. The first chapter is a brief review of relevant literature, in which cross-cultural communication and the great influence of cultural differences on cross-cultural communication are discussed. In the second chapter, we first introduce the content of hotel service and culture of hotel service and the hotel vocational education abroad and at home. We think it is of great significance to develop HSET and strengthen cross-cultural communication education in HSET in the modern society. The third chapter is the core of the whole study. In the part, we put forward principles of cognitive, assimilation, comparison tolerance and politeness in HSET and study several cases in the hotels. In the fourth chapter, we hold that some teaching strategies in HSET are worth following: enhancing the properness of hotel service English, adopting situational communicative teaching strategies, studying cultural similarities and differences between Chinese and English so as to remove obstacles in cross-cultural communication. Then, the conclusion of the thesis.