Teaching English Reading To Develop Intercultural Competence Among Non-english Majors

The21stcentury witnesses a dramatically changing world, in which people fromdifferent cultures and languages increasingly get in touch with one another on a daily basis.In the context of globalization, teaching English as an international language instead of aforeign language has gained universal acknowledgement among language researchers inChina. Therefore, many researchers are appealing for FLT to take the cultivation ofstudents’ intercultural competence as its ultimate goal.Non-English majors in China make up the majority of English learners and shoulderthe arduous tasks of cooperation and exchanges with the outside world in the future.Therefore, promoting their intercultural competence has become an urgent mission forEnglish teaching. In this thesis, the author argues that the teaching of English reading is aneffective means to help students acquire cultural knowledge, develop an open mindtowards foreign cultures and promote their intercultural awareness, which will ultimatelyenable them to communicate appropriately and effectively in an intercultural context.The idea of developing students’ ICC with the teaching of English reading is based onthe following findings:1) reading, especially intensive reading, is a multi-purposecomprehensive course. According to the College English Curriculum Requirements (ForTrial Implementation)[大学英语课程教学要求（试行）(2004)], students should be instructedto acquire integrated skills in listening, speaking, reading, writing, translation and developtheir communicative competence and intercultural competence in this course;2) a detailedand comprehensive analysis of New Horizon College English (NHCE)[新视野大学英语]Book II made by the author proves that textbooks currently in use by non-English majorscan shoulder the task of teaching culture owing to the fact that culture can be foundeverywhere in the textbook, making the teaching of culture feasible and approachable, and3)reading activities can be used to develop students’ ICC and the classroom will become thebest place to practice their ICC if the teachers keep culture teaching in their mind whendesigning the activities.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one is a brief introduction to the researchand the current situation of culture teaching among non-English majors in China. The data obtained from the English teachers’ questionnaires revealed that although most teachersacknowledged the importance of teaching culture, the teaching of linguistic skills still tooka lion’s share in intensive reading classes. Whether culture was taught heavily depended onwhether it would hinder students’ understanding of the text. The neglect of culture inteaching English to non-English majors results in their low socio-cultural competence. As aresult, they are not well prepared for this world, where intercultural contacts become moreand more frequent. Chapter two is the theoretical study of the present research on ICC. Itbegins with the discussion of the interdependence of language, culture and communication,and then proceeds to look into the theory of communicative competence put forward byHymes, Canale and Swain and van Ek. Finally, the studies on intercultural competence athome and abroad are introduced. Chapter Three is about two detailed surveys conductedamong non-English majors in Jiaxing College, Zhejiang Province in China. To learn aboutthe factors hindering culture teaching and assess ICC of non-English majors, questionnairewere sent to one hundred students and eighty-six of them were randomly chosen to helpwith the following socio-cultural test. The statistics obtained from the questionnaires andthe socio-cultural test revealed that the learning and teaching of culture still escaped theattention of the students and teachers as well, due to which the students’ command ofculture knowledge was rather limited and their intercultural competence did not improvemuch after years of learning. Chapter four is about a detailed and comprehensive analysisof NHCE Book II and its implications on the teaching of culture. At the end of this chapter,some techniques of incorporating the teaching of culture into intensive reading class willbe suggested and a detailed description about an attempt to teach culture in her class ispresented by the author. Based on the above analysis and discussion, the author is convincedthat the teaching of English reading can fulfill the task of teaching both linguistic skills andICC as well. Chapter Five is a conclusion in which the limitations of the present researchare mentioned and possible directions for further research are suggested.