A Task-Based Learning Approach To Intercultural Communication Competence Development For High School Students

In the past 25 years, there is a broad agreement that the cultural dimension has three aspects: knowledge, attitude and behavior. In cultural teaching, there exist two categories, cultural knowledge and cultural understanding. Recent researches show that cultural teaching should go beyond cultural knowledge to cultural understanding. Meanwhile, three teaching models have deeply affected English teaching circles: PPP, TTT and TBL. Countless practices have proved that TBL is effective in the classroom teaching and better than the other two since 1980s. Nowadays, TBL is being introduced into Chinese elementary English teaching.Though cultural teaching is common in colleges and universities, in high schools, the present research mainly focuses on how to teach culture in English classroom teaching. Obviously, both cultural teaching and TBL are still at their initial stage in high schools. In addition, it is still an untouched field to study the TBL approach to cultural teaching.The characteristic of this paper is to attempt to first join TBL and cultural teaching together and set out to do the following:To verify the TBL approach to intercultural communication competence development for high school students is effective based on data analysis.To make some comments on current cultural teaching, the misunderstandings and problems about the TBL approach from the angle of teaching practice and theoretical analysis.To expound that the final goal of cultural teaching is to develop students' self-esteem character from the angles of cultural characteristics and social development.This paper consists of five chapters. First, literature reviews on the subject are presented in Chapter I. Then the importance of cultural teaching in high schools is analyzed in Chapter II. In Chapter III, application of the TBLapproach to intercultural communication competence development for high school students is discussed and illustrated. In Chapter IV, some comments on the TBL approach to cultural teaching are argued, and finally in Chapter V, arguments are summed up.The originality of this paper lies in that the aim of cultural teaching is to foster not only the culturally-competent learner, but also the intercultural personality and that the core factor in cultural teaching is to develop students' self-esteem character based on absorbing excellent achievements of various cultures.