A Tentative Study On The Cultivation Of Intercultural Communication Competence Through English Movies

This thesis is a tentative research on the teaching practice through movie appreciation, aiming at cultivating English learners’ intercultural communication competence. With the development of economic globalization, the world is becoming an ever intimately associated whole. The contacts between countries increase intensively, the phenomena and power of intercultural communication are continuously emerging. As one part of the globalization process, China attaches much importance to the contact with other countries, therefore, English teaching is put in a significant position in China. However, traditional English teaching emphasizes the training of listening, speaking, reading and writing skills, ignoring the significance of cultural input, thus effective and appropriate intercultural communication is hard to realize. To improve the efficiency of intercultural communication, the cultivation of English learners’ intercultural communication competence should constitute the goal of English teaching in present China. Many scholars have noticed this, whereas, the lack of an authentic language environment stands in the way of enhancing intercultural communication competence.Movie, as an integrated art form of vision and sound, contains loads of cultural information and provides an authentic language circumstance. As a result, it is often employed to train listening and speaking skills. Its application in cultivating intercultural communication competence is limited, simply focusing theoretical study and analysis of its feasibility.This thesis reviews the definition of intercultural communication competence and theories concerning its components and summarizes four categories of the components. Following this, this thesis generalizes the advantages and disadvantages of applying English movies in language teaching, after reviewing the theoretical basis for movie appreciation as a teaching tool and the characteristics of movies. Based on this, together with the components of intercultural communication competence, four criteria of movie selection are put forward. At last, this thesis reviews the communicative approach. Under this approach, this thesis proposes a tentative teaching practice through movie appreciation on the basis of the summary of the components of intercultural communication competence and the four principles of movie selection. It can provide the English foreign language teachers with some enlightenment on how to effectively use English movies in developing intercultural communication competence.