An Empirical Study Of The Senior High School Students’Intercultural Communicative Competence

Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC), as one of the most important topics in intercultural communication area, is also an essential part in foreign language teaching, English language teaching in particular. The ultimate goal of English language teaching is not only to improve the knowledge of English language itself but also to cultivate the learners’intercultural communicative competence. However, the cases of those who can get high marks in English test but fail to communicate with people from English-speaking countries are countless. Therefore, cultivating intercultural communicative competence has become the core of foreign language teaching.Great achievements as the study of intercultural communicative competence has made in China, a majority of them are theoretical studies. Empirical studies are rare, most of which are about the empirical study of intercultural communicative competence in college English teaching. We are lack of empirical studies on Chinese senior high school students’ intercultural communicative competence. According to Chen&Starosta’s conceptual framework of intercultural communicative competence, Intercultural Sensitivity (IS) is the affective aspect of intercultural communicative competence and is generally believed the well performance in English test means one can interact with people from English-speaking countries smoothly. Based on these concerning, two important questions have been proposed, that is,1) What is the relationship within Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC), Intercultural Sensitivity (IS) and English Language Proficiency (ELP)? To what extend do they correlate with each other?2) What are the weak points in senior high school students’intercultural communicative competence according to the descriptive analysis on intercultural communicative competence in this study?Under the guidance of some theories on intercultural communicative competence, theoretical and empirical, quantitative and qualitative research approaches are applied in this study whose participants are senior high school students from three different schools in Anhui Suzhou City, altogether300students chosen. Tests on Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) and on English Language Proficiency (ELP), a questionnaire on Intercultural Sensitivity (IS) are adopted to get the data and statistics. Finally, by using the software SPSS19.0, the research questions of this thesis have been made clear:1) There is no correlation within Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC), English Language Proficiency (ELP) and Intercultural Sensitivity (IS);2) According to the test results of intercultural communicative competence, senior high school students have well acquired the superficial knowledge concerning about the target language culture while performed badly in the deep social value system.Based on the findings in this research, two essential pedagogical implications have been made:1) In the English language teaching and evaluation, the previous form, which focuses on the instruction and evaluation on English language structure itself, should be replaced by the comprehensive teaching pattern, which is to take both English language knowledge and language application, both intercultural communicative knowledge and intercultural communicative competence into consideration;2) In the process of intercultural communicative competence teaching, not only the superficial knowledge concerning about English language culture but also the deep social value system behind should be acquired and understood by the students.