Cultivating Students’ Intercultural Comunicative Competence Based On Experiencing Concept

One final aim of foreign language teaching is to improve learners’ interculturalcommunicative competence, and efficient culture teaching method is a decisive factor in theprocess. Many scholars have conducted research on culture teaching and the most famous oneis Kolb’s experiencing concept proposed in1984. In the following three decades, manywestern scholars have researched on it. In China, experiential teaching is also proposed andadvocated in the new curriculum reform. In colleges, the course “An Introduction to theEnglish-Speaking Countries” is the special cultural course designed for English majorstudents. But how to teach culture more effectively has remained a problem for Englishculture teachers and researchers.Based on Kolb’s experiencing concept theory, this research makes a case study on thethird year English course “An Introduction to the English-Speaking Countries” in JinchengVocational and Technical Institute of Shanxi Province. There are three research questions:1.What is the students’ current intercultural communicative competence like in this college?2.Is culture teaching with the experiential method significantly more effective than thetraditional method in improving students’ intercultural communicative competence?3. Whatkind of experiential model can be applied to improve learners’ intercultural communicativecompetence? In this research, contrastive experimental research method is used. In thebeginning of the term (the first term of2012-2013academic year), the researcher uses test,questionnaire and interview to investigate the students’ current intercultural communicative competence. Then the experiment is done. The experiential method is used in theexperimental class and the traditional method is used in the control class. In the process, theteacher observes the students and does the second interview. In the end of the term, the test,questionnaire and interview are used again to testify the effects and efficiency of theexperiential method in order to know whether the experiential method is better than thetraditional method in improving the students’ intercultural communicative competence. Thedata in the research is dealt with by SPSS16.0. Through discussion, the results are concluded.Qualitative analysis is done on the interview answers.The research results include three points. Firstly, before the experiment, the students’intercultural communicative competence is poor and there is no significant difference betweenthe two groups. Secondly, after the experiment, the students’ intercultural communicativecompetence in the experimental class is improved much more than that in the control class.Thirdly, through the experiment, a concrete, feasible and practical experiential teaching modelis formed, which has four steps:1. Contacting, that is, the students contact the new culturalknowledge through experiencing so as to form their primary opinions of the new knowledge;2. Conflicting, that is, when the students learn the new knowledge, conflicts with their priorknowledge will be produced so as to attribute to analysis and thinking;3. Adjusting, that is,the students will do some adjustments to develop their cultural adaptation and communication;4. Assimilating, that is, the students get assimilated to the fine parts of the target culture toimprove their intercultural communicative competence.