Development Of Intercultural Communication Competence In Business English Teaching For College Students

With the deepening of globalization, China, as a member of WTO, gets more communication with other countries. To adapt international competition, China calls for more expertise who can master business knowledge and intercultural communication competence. It is an unprecedented challenge for English teaching, especially business English teaching. In traditional teaching, teachers tend to focus on linguistic ability as grammar and vocabulary and ignore the development of students'intercultural communication competence. That makes students'business English study imperfect. Many failed cases in international trade have shown that what Chinese lack is intercultural communication competence. Chinese business English teacher should know how to foster student'ICC in teaching.Recent years, papers on development of intercultural communication competence in English teaching are getting more. It stands for demand of the age and a necessity of society development. Professor He Weixiang points that three reasons for the high emphasis on intercultural communication competence as follows: first intercultural communication competence is becoming a part of people's life; intercultural communication competence caused more misunderstanding and conflicts when people communicate in intercultural settings; intercultural communication competence by the way of using foreign language has been regarded as an important quality of modern people.The thesis conducts a research to testify how to develop students'intercultural communication competence. It includes three questions as follows: firstly, how do college business English teachers teach in teaching practice on student's development of intercultural communication competence? What are the main factors affecting students to develop their intercultural communication competence? Does communicative language teaching approach play a better role than that of traditional teaching approach on students'development of their intercultural communication competence?Based on the above mentioned questions, the researcher conducts a questionnaire to know what kind of teaching approaches that teachers have adopted in teaching business English and how do they design their test paper for students ICC development. The teachers surveyed mainly come from four universities in Shandong province: Shandong University, Qingdao University, Shandong Science and Technology University,and Qingdao Binhai College.Considering the importance of intercultural communication, the researcher takes business English teaching task for class one and class two of international business major of 2008 grade during the first semester between 2008 and 2009. Class one was taught with traditional teaching approach. In contrast, Class two was taught with mainly by communicative language teaching approach under business English settings. In order to prove the effectiveness of the two teaching approaches, the researcher did an intercultural test. For a better understanding of experiment group's response, the researcher interviewed students and discussed about their feelings on teaching approaches besides their setbacks or doubts and study interest, etc during the process. Interview result is analyzed by generalization and description methods from a qualitative perspective.The research shows: under the same condition, the experiment group (class two) achieved better result on development of intercultural communication competence than that of comparing class (class one) after they get one semester communicative language teaching; most students in class two like the diversified activities in business English class and their study interest increase obviously. They have got a fresh understanding on business English course and formed their own communicative strategies primarily in international business settings under the researcher's help. The researcher proposes some suggestive strategies on improving student's intercultural communication competence under business settings for business English teachers reference based on his own one semester's research on teaching approach combined with former researchers'inspiration.The researcher at last summarizes his findings and again emphasize there is a long way to foster students'intercultural communication competence development. The researcher does a small scale experiment and achieves a lot and hope to work together with other business English teachers for further research on the field. It can cultivate more excellent business college students under multicultural backgrounds.This paper consists of six chapters. Chapter One, the introduction, provides the necessity of improving students'ICC and illustrate the research background, purpose, and significance. In Chapter Two, literature related to the study is reviewed from abroad and at home on ICC theory, theories on Pragmatics and Context. In Chapter Three, there is empirical study in which detailed information about the subjects, instruments, and procedures for conducting the experiment are reported. Chapter Four, the results of the experiment are shown and the discussions are given as well. In Chapter Five, some strategic suggestions are proposed as well. Chapter Six, the whole study is summarized together with the limitation of the study as well as some suggestions for the further research are shown.