An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Inlaid Idiom Teaching On The Improvement Of College Students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence

Globalization has made intercultural communication a common means of communication.However, this kind of communication is not an easy task. The majority of Chinese college studentsstill cannot carry out successful intercultural communication even after they have received7to9years of English education. Pragmatic failures often occur in their intercultural communication. Oneof the reasons why so many years of English learning fails to guarantee their ability to communicatesuccessfully with foreigners is that their previous learning is mainly focused on the acquisition of thebasic knowledge, while the bi-lingual cultural knowledge, which is deemed as a necessity inintercultural communication, is seldom involved.About how to improve English learners’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC) byenriching their bi-lingual cultural knowledge, the researcher has put forward three hypotheses on thebasis of one of the distinctive characteristics of idioms, that is, culture-loaded. Hypothesis1is thatinlaid idiom teaching can most effectively enlarge college students’ culture-rich vocabulary.Hypothesis2is that inlaid idiom teaching can most effectively improve college students’ commonbi-lingual cultural knowledge. Hypothesis3is that inlaid idiom teaching can exert a positive impacton college students’ ICC. To test these hypotheses, an empirical experiment has been conducted.The subjects of this experimental research are two non-English major classes in Jincheng Collegeof Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. One class is treated as the experimental group,while the other one is treated as the control group. At first, the researcher tries to get a picture of thesefreshmen’s status quo of ICC by means of an idiom investigation and a pre-test. Then, based on thesituation of the experimental group students, the researcher has designed a kind of inlaid idiomteaching, that is, spending15minutes of every English class teaching some English and Chineseidioms as a kind of bi-lingual culture input. Besides, some common bi-lingual cultural knowledgerelated to these idioms is introduced as well. Meanwhile, such inlaid idiom teaching is well integratedwith daily textbook learning. This experiment lasts about one semester in the experimental class. Atthe end of the semester, students’ overall ICC is tested by means of a post-test, which is similar to thepre-test. With the help of the data collected from the experiment and the information got from theinvestigation as well as class observation, the researcher tests the three hypotheses respectively.From the experiment it can be concluded that Hypothesis1is true. That is to say, the inlaid idiomteaching can enlarge college students’ culture-rich vocabulary significantly. Hypothesis2is also true, which means the inlaid idiom teaching can improve college students’ common bi-lingual culturalknowledge effectively. About Hypothesis3, it is found that students’ overall ICC has been largelyimproved through the inlaid idiom teaching, which indicates that Hypothesis3is true. However, theinlaid idiom teaching has exerted a much larger impact on improving students’ common bi-lingualcultural knowledge than enlarging their culture-rich vocabulary. So, it can be concluded that students’ICC bears a closer relationship with common bi-lingual cultural knowledge than with the culture-richvocabulary. It is such improvement in common bi-lingual cultural knowledge that has exerted apositive impact on the subjects’ ICC.Based on the findings of the experiment, some constructive and practical suggestions are putforward in order to accelerate college students’ development of ICC.