A Survey Of Senior High School Students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence And Teaching Strategies

With the continuous development of society and the growing demand for interculturalcommunication, English becomes more important than ever in daily interaction.Communicators should know what each other’s intended messages are. Therefore, for havingsuccessful intercultural communication, communicators not only need to speak Englishfluently, but also need to learn when, to whom and how they should speak.Nowadays, the cultivation of intercultural communicative competence has graduallybecome the core of foreign language teaching. In2003, the Ministry of Education issued TheEnglish Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools, which first makes cultural awarenessobjective as one of the general curriculum objectives in senior high schools; The NewCurriculum Standard issued in2012especially emphasizes the importance of students’intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence; meanwhile the Englishtextbook increases a lot of new contents about intercultural knowledge. How to makeintercultural communication successful has attracted special attention, and the cultivation ofthe intercultural communicative competence has been the ultimate goal of foreign languageteaching. However, during the procedure of foreign language teaching in senior high schools,intercultural knowledge and students’ intercultural communicative competence do not getmore attention for some reason. On the basis of the current situation, the author surveys24English teachers and160senior high school students who are from two classes in XunxianFirst Senior High School, Henan Province, with the aid of the questionnaire, the interview, thestatistical software SPSS and the theory of intercultural communication. The study includesthree research questions. First, what is the actual situation of senior high school students’ ICC?Secondly, what are the main factors affecting the improvement of students’ ICC in senior high school? Thirdly, how to effectively develop the students’ ICC during English teaching insenior high school? By analyzing students’ questionnaires, the results reveal most studentsdon’t quite understand intercultural knowledge; their intercultural awareness is not overlystrong; but most students have interest in cultivating intercultural communicative competencewhile the interest do not translate into action; and most students think the main cause of thissituation is the lack of practice opportunities. By analyzing English teachers’ questionnaire,the results show almost all the English teachers have realized the importance of theintercultural knowledge and intercultural communicative competence; however, most of themdo not pay more attention to it in the actual teaching activities. According to the researchresults, the author puts forward four suggestions on how to improve senior high schoolstudents’ intercultural communicative competence in English teaching, which includes: first,making good use of textbook, expanding intercultural knowledge; secondly, creating a helpfulenvironment for students to participate in teaching activities; thirdly, comparing Chinese andforeign cultures, cultivating intercultural awareness; fourthly, fostering students’ excellentpsychological quality.This survey has reached the expected effect. The author gets to know the actual situationand existing questions of senior high school students’ intercultural communicativecompetence and puts some corresponding solutions, which can help teachers to effectivelyimprove senior high school students’ intercultural communicative competence in the furtherEnglish teaching activities. In addition, this survey can also provide some useful data andsuggestions for further research in this field.