Principle And Practice Of Assessing ICC In CET

Intercultural Communication Competence(ICC), a major concept in intercultural communication,is recognized as an indispensable part of language learning. Researches show that learning a foreign language goes far beyond the command of the grammatical structures if one wants to use the language to communicate appropriately and effectively in interaction.Many researches have been done to explore areas related to Intercultural Communication Competence, from the necessity of culture teaching, to how to improve students'ICC. Yet the assessment of ICC in English language teaching classroom is still in an exploratory stage. On one hand, testing is an indispensable part of language curriculum design and should become the concern of foreign language teaching circle including researchers, teachers and decision-makers. On the other hand, owing to the feedback effect of testing on teaching and learning activities, the assessment of ICC should not be ignored. In existing researches, the assessment of Intercultural Communication Competence often takes the traditional form of written test, which is effective for the testing of knowledge. But when it comes to the assessment of the attitudinal and behavioral aspect of ICC, traditional written tests seem inadequate. Starting from this point, this thesis focuses on research of the assessment of ICC.Principle and practice of ICC assessment are the major concerns of this thesis. After the reconstruction of the ICC concept and construction, the objective-based principle was put forward according to Brown's Systematic Approach to Designing and Maintaining Language curriculum. In the practice of ICC assessment, this principle should be followed. More efforts were made to the building of a clear objective for the cultivation of college students'ICC. The author of this thesis holds that with objectives in mind, language teachers will procure achievement on the way of ICC assessment through the adoption of appropriate assessment procedures. So after the construction of ICC is further explained, objective for the cultivation of students'ICC of CET was provided, proposals were given to assess students'ICC in this thesis. In the end, portfolio assessment of ICC was proposed as an appropriate and effective way of ICC assessment.Despite all the ink that has been expended on the assessment of ICC in this thesis, it continues to be the most challenging aspect of any foreign language curriculum.The validation of proposed objective and assessing methods need more proof from future research. It is to be hoped that this thesis help bring some of the best ideas to more researchers'attention as to how to evaluate intercultural communicative competence.