Intercultural Communicative Competence Cultivation:Stated Beliefs And Teaching Practice

It is necessary to learn a foreign language from an intercultural perspective.The Ministry of Education explicitly incorporated “cultural awareness” as an independent content in Ordinary High School English Curriculum Standards(OHSECS)issued in 2003,involving cultural knowledge,cultural understanding and intercultural communicative awareness and competence.Therefore,in the process of foreign language learning,educators and learners should pay more attention to intercultural learning.The belief held by senior high school English teachers about the cultivation of students' intercultural communicative competence(ICC)is directly related to the implementation of OHSECS.At present,most senior high school English teachers have a clear awareness of cultural teaching,but the cultural teaching consciousness reflected in their cultural teaching practice is not consistent with the cultural teaching consciousness advocated by OHSECS.Moreover,the teaching beliefs held by some English teachers are inconsistent with their actual teaching practices owing to some internal and external factors.In recent years,the research on language teachers' beliefs and practice has witnessed a dramatic increase(Borg,2006).However,specific analyses of ICC from teachers' perspective are rarely seen.In order to further understand the teaching beliefs of senior high school English teachers,qualitative research is employed to explore the relationship between beliefs and practice of senior high school English teachers through interviews and classroom observation.Besides,some basic factors influencing the belief of high school English teachers are discussed.Research results show that the two senior high school English teachers held different teaching beliefs on ICC,and their beliefs can affect their classroom teaching to some extent.However,teachers' teaching practice does not always reflect their teaching beliefs.Mismatches exists between their beliefs and their actual classroom practices.Many factors leading to the mismatches and here four main factors are listed: firstly,foreign language teaching policy of ICC instruction has not yet given enough attention,which specifically reflected in the curriculum standards,teaching materials,teaching methods and teaching evaluation.Secondly,due to the restrictions of in-service and pre-service training as well as teaching methods,teachers do not know how to get the best of both culture and language instruction during the limited class periods.Thirdly,owing to current teaching materials are out of line with college entrance examination,teachers show little concern about ICC instruction in their daily English classes.Lastly,teachers are limited by their own insufficiency of intercultural knowledge,which hinders themselves from instructing ICC.Based on the research findings,suggestions on teacher professionalism,teacher training and ICC cultivation have been put forward.