An Empirical Research On The Application Of Politeness Principle In The Cultivation Of Intercultural Communicative Competence

In the context of globalization where the intercultural communication is increasingly frequent and gradually deepening, contacts among different social and cultural groups in economic, political, cultural and other areas are closer and the mutual dependence is becoming more pronounced. However, it doesn't mean that there will be less problems or conflicts during the course of intercultural communication. Instead, misunderstanding and collisions in the communication among people from different cultural backgrounds are coming into prominence because of the cultural differences and the lack of intercultural communicative competence. Familiarity with culture of English-speaking countries, especially their communicative culture, is required to communicate in English, the most widely used language in today's world.New challenges arise to English teaching in these surroundings. More and more researchers and teachers realize that English teaching should aim at improving learners' intercultural communicative competence rather than merely linguistic competence. Furthermore, intercultural communicative competence has been proposed to be the final goal of English teaching, which means the ability to behave appropriately in a specific social and cultural group. To a certain extent, as a civilized approach widely used by different groups and societies, politeness restricts the appropriateness of people's words and deeds. Although the research on the intercultural communicative competence as well as on the politeness principle has been fruitful and the related theories on the relationship between the two have also been referred to, the empirical research is still needed. Taking it as the starting point, the present author finds out the close relationship between the improvement of intercultural communicative competence and the application of politeness principle based on her analyses of data collected from teachers and students and her daily observation. It is found that the proper application of politeness principle is positively stimulative to the cultivation and improvement of learners' intercultural communicative competence.In this research, 98 freshmen from two classes of Xi'an Si Yuan Institute were chosen as the subjects. Teachers' application of politeness principle and students' English leaning status were investigated through questionnaires while students' intercultural communicative competence was examined through a test. The result of both questionnaire and test were computed and analyzed statistically with SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). The analysis explored the relationship between politeness and the cultivation of intercultural commumcative competence and the stimulative impact of the former on the latter was found. Based on the analysis and research of the data, suggestions are proposed from the perspective of English teaching. Politeness teaching, which is a part of cultural teaching, should be combined with language teaching in order to enhance the teaching efficiency and improve learners' intercultural communicative competence. The goal of intercultural communication can be achieved only when misunderstanding and conflicts are avoided in the real-life intercultural communication.