A Study Of The ’Three-Two-One’ English Teaching Model In Cultivating ICC

Nowadays, the traditional English abilities(listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating) cannot meet the need of intercultural communication with the development of globalization, so intercultural competence(ICC) has been more and more indispensable. And also, it is essential for soldiers and officers to strengthen ICC to cope with the international military affairs. Thus, the ’Three-Two-One’ English teaching model has been carried out in a South China Military University(SCMU) to cultivate cadets’ ICC. This study is to research the role of this model in cultivating cadets’ ICC.The study is mainly focused on three questions:1. What is the status quo of cadets’ ICC in SCMU?2. Is there a correlation between the English proficiency of cadets in SCMU and their ICC?3. What is the role of five aspects(classroom instruction, extracurricular activities, network space and teachers’ and students’ roles) of the ’Three-Two-One English teaching model in cultivating cadets’ ICC?Four-dimension model of ICC is chosen as the theoretical framework. Questionnaires are utilized followed by classroom observation and interviews. The questionnaire consists of the Demographic Information Survey and Intercultural Competence Self-assessment Scale. 381 cadets including freshmen, sophomores and juniors from 7 different colleges are randomly chosen as subjects to answer questionnaires. 34 English classes and 1 English debates training are observed and 18 cadets and 16 teachers are interviewed within 4 months. The information from the observation and interviews is quantified. Data are put into SPSS 20.0 or Excel and are analyzed through descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA and General Linear Model Univariate procedure.The results reveal that the cadets in SCMU share the medium high ICC, but they lack intercultural knowledge and skills generally. Although there is no salient gap in ICC when learners reach a certain English level(CET-4), ICC still differs significantly while the difference of the linguistic level is obvious. The ’Three-Two-One’ model is helpful to cultivate cadets’ ICC, but the effectiveness is not significant. Extracurricular activities facilitate developing ICC. Culture teaching is simply embedded into classroom instruction and network space is still in construction. The leading role of teachers and the initiative of students do not perform well.The significance of this study is that it constructs a new model of ICC and improves the self-assessment scale of ICC. What’s more, the effectiveness of the ’Three-Two-One’ English teaching model in cultivating ICC is learned, which is useful for the further reform of college English teaching in SCMU.