Developing English Learners’ Intercultural Communication Competence In The College Classroom

In the current climate of globalization and for the demand of international business development,intercultural communicative competence(ICC)begins to be set under the spot light.It has been a growing consensus about the need for crucial attention to foreign language learners’ ICC in the field of foreign language education.The goal of ICC oriented foreign language teaching is to make the learners competent enough to employ the target language to communicate efficiently and appropriately with people from other cultural backgrounds.In spite of the fact that there is some research conducted in China to explore the conception of ICC and its implementation in pedagogical practice,a review of the published literature in the past decades has revealed that few empirical studies investigate the knowledge about EFL teachers’ perceptions towards learners’ ICC promotion in English language learning classroom.Thus,this thesis did a survey on EFL teachers from a comprehensive university in Chongqing,attempting to find out how language educators perceive ICC teaching in English classrooms.On the basis of the theoretical model put forward in Gu’s(2017)framework,a questionnaire survey was conducted among English language teachers in this university,and semi-structured interviews were carried out in order to further probe the following questions: 1)How do English language teachers perceive ―culture‖ and ICC in English language teaching? 2)What are English teachers’ teaching objectives and to what extent they consider the ICC promotion as one of their instruction objectives? 3)What are their opinions on the practices to achieve English learners’ ICC in the classroom?The findings show that 1)About the understanding the culture in FLT,most teachers considered culture as the factual knowledge that can be transmitted through them and they showed more preference to the behavioural patterns like daily routines,ways of living and religion.Regarding the idea about the ICC in the FLT,teachers considered the ICC teaching as a field of research which is faraway from the classroom instruction and they seemed to discount the importance of Chinese culture in their English teaching.2)About the teaching goals,equipping students with a level of language proficiency came first.Also,it might be assumed that teachers definitely want to integrate the teaching of ICC in their language teaching,but some contextual constraints,such as limited teaching period,imperfect curriculum,overloaded schedules,deficient ICC knowledge and restricted culture materials and class activities hinder the application of ICC teaching.3)The majority of teachers preferred the class that belongs to the ―teacher-centered‖ category and teachers were prone to implement the activities that mainly address the knowledge dimension of ICC.Even though some teachers approached typical student-centered activities,the evaluation or feedback from peers and teachers,is far from sufficient and helpful.