A Study On Rural Students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence And Its Cultivation In Senior High School English Teaching

Since China has become the world’s second-largest economy, communications between China and other countries have become more and more frequent against the background of globalization. With the increasing intercultural communications, acquiring Intercultural Communicative Competence(ICC) shows its importance to the modern talents. Those who have intercultural awareness and the ability to communicate accurately and appropriately in intercultural communications are desperately needed in the modern world.For senior high school students, basic linguistic knowledge of English language learned in class can’t meet the need of the society. As one of the main teaching contents and objectives of senior high school, “to enhance intercultural understanding and intercultural communicative competence” has been first written into the National ELT Curriculum for Senior High Schools(2003).The subject of the study is the senior high school students who are from rural areas. These students have their own features in English learning. Since 1980 s,many Chinese educators and teachers have undertaken researches and published many works and articles about Intercultural Communicative Competence. However, relatively few researches focus on senior high school rural students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence. The study aims to find out the actual current situation of Intercultural Communicative Competence among rural students, analyze major problems with culture teaching and describe the methods to introduce western culture in order to cultivate rural students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence.By analyzing the data from the socio-cultural test taken by 105 rural students and the interviews by 20 of them, the author finds out the rural students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence needs to be improved, so do the methods to cultivate Intercultural Communicative Competence. Insufficient attention to culture teaching, simple ways to introduce culture, few channels for acquiring culture knowledge all form difficulties for culture teaching, which affect the improvement of rural students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence. Based on a study of the related literature and long-term observation, the author attempts to explore the way to implement culture teaching, which includes principles, contents and methods of culture teaching, which aims to cultivate the rural students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence. Hope the study can provide references to improve rural students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence.