An Intercultural Approach To Foreign Language Teaching(FLT)

The second culture acquisition is almost a new field which needs to be investigated further. In the west, Hamers & Blanc proposed that successful second language acquisition (SLA) should be accompanied by second culture acquisition (SCA). Meanwhile, J. Schumann created Acculturation Model which also became an important theory in foreign language learning, Chumann(1978)indicated that foreign language acquisition should be a part of cultural acculturation model; the cultural acculturation of target language would determine the command of target language. In a way expansions of linguistic competence should be accompanied by expansions of cultural competence, which suggests that there should be straightforward parallelism between SLA and SCA.In order to verify whether the language competence and intercultural communication competence have significant correlation, the author has done an empirical study. The empirical study has been carried out in a Normal university, for which more than 100 junior students from English Majors and Non-English Majors were selected to participate in the test and questionnaire, and then 100 valid test papers to deal with the SPSS software and EXCEL. The results prove that the competence of intercultural communication doesn't have an inevitable correlation with the language competence. However, culture teaching plays an important role in cultivating the capacity of intercultural communication. Therefore, it is an indispensable part in the foreign language teaching. So this thesis tries to integrate the second culture acquisition with foreign language teaching organically. According to the features of foreign language teaching in our country, the intercultural approach to the foreign language teaching is explored and constructed in the thesis with its basic goal is to cultivate the competence of intercultural communication. In the practical teaching, the author advocates the integration of language teaching and culture teaching.The thesis consists of four parts. In the first part, the author firstly introduces the theory of second culture acquisition, and expounds the five models of second culture acquisition. In the second part, the author presents the reformative trend in the foreign language teaching theory comprehensively, and gives introductions to the earlier, latter and humanistic syllabus respectively. In the third part, the author explores the relationship between the second culture and the foreign language teaching. In the fourth part, the author describes the empirical study by the research objectives, subjective, instruments, results and implications, also proposes the model of intercultural approach to the foreign language teaching, and describes the content of intercultural approach to the FLT, the features of curriculum of intercultural approach to FLT and its teaching model in details. Finally the author draws a conclusion of the whole thesis and points out the necessity and practicability of the intercultural approach to the foreign language teaching.