Culture Simulation In Foreign Language School English Teaching

The21stcentury is marked with globalization, and the language of English hasbeen playing a more and more significant role in the new century. English is used invarious aspects of life, such as education, world economy and in different workingplaces. The teaching of English has achieved more momentum and emphasis in thepast decades.China s first foreign language school was founded in1963, and with thedeepening of reform and open-up policies, more and more foreign language schoolswere set up afterwards. Foreign language schools, unlike other middles schools, havebeen set up to shoulder more responsibility of cultivating students into internationaltalents. These international talents should not only have a good command of English,but also be competent enough in intercultural communication. The English teaching inforeign language schools are of great significance and is highly emphasized. However,though students in FLS have linguistic competence and communicative competence,they have limited knowledge in terms of culture difference when dealing with peoplefrom other cultures. There are limited Intercultural Communication courses ortextbooks available for students in foreign language schools. Thus, the authorproposes to incorporate intercultural approaches into current English Teaching forforeign language schools in order to foster students intercultural sensitiveness andimprove their intercultural communicative competence.The author introduced communicative competence and interculturalcommunicative competence, and analyzed students needs in improving their ICC.Then IC training is designed and research is conducted. The research mainly adoptsexperimental methodology. Totally54Shanghai Foreign Language School students inJunior Two participated in the experiment.27of them took the IC training and servedas treatment group. The other27students didn t receive IC training and were thecontrol group. In the5-week IC training, Intercultural Sensitizer approach wasadopted, together with lectures on Hofstede s cultural dimensions. The result of theexperiment was analyzed though questionnaire surveys (ISS) and interviews with thehelp of SPSS, and the result showed the ICC of the students from the experimental group was more significantly improved than that of the control group, which provedthe effectiveness and feasibility of the IC training with intercultural approaches.