An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Utilizing 21^st Century To Cultivate The Junior Middle School Students’ Intercultural Communication Competence

The trend of globalization necessitates the intercultural communication around the world and highlights the significance of cultivating intercultural communication competence(ICC),Yet,researches on junior middle school students indicate that their ICC is at quite a low level and the teaching of it seems ineffective,making it essential for further research.Since the 1960s,scholars at home and abroad have done a plethora of studies on ICC and put forth some suggestions about utilizing English newspapers as a teaching aid.This thesis aims at integrating the reading of 21st Century Teens,a popular English newspaper,into English class teaching and learning to improve the students’ ICC level.For this purpose,two research questions(RQ)have been raised.RQ1:What’s the junior middle school students’ current status of ICC and what are the main difficulties for the students to improve their ICC?RQ2:In which aspects and to what degree can the integration of newspaper reading improve the intercultural communication competence level of the junior middle school students?To seek the answers to the two RQs,this study has adopted Hu Wenzhong’s(2013)ICC theory as the theoretical framework and the empirical research methods of experiment.The subjects of the experiment in this study consisted of 80 students from two parallel classes of Grade Eight in Peixian Tanglou Middle School.The reasons why they were selected were that they were taught by the researcher,that they had similar English teaching and learning background and English level,and that they were cooperative.Class Five was treated with both the English textbook and the extra reading of the 21st Century Teens,and Class Six with only the English textbook.The weekly newspaper for Class Five was edited by China Daily.The instruments employed in this study were pre-test and post-test adapted and translated from Gao Xiaoyan’s(2010)The Survey and Analysis of High School Students’ ICC and the cultural consciousness target(Level 5)of New Curriculum Standard.The data were collected by the researcher from pre-test and post-test results,and the number of total valid was 80.Data analysis involving scoring,independent-sample T test and paired-sample T test were employed to compare the significant different effects of the two methods in the ICC levels of the two classes.Specifically,the research findings were twofold.On the one hand,the integration of English newspaper reading could enrich classroom reading in junior middle school English teaching and learning and improve the students’ ICC level.From the two tests,we could find that the average score of the CC has improved from 26.45 to 28.05 while that in the EC improved from 26.80 to 36.28.On the other hand,the integration of English newspaper reading could improve the ICC in three different aspects:intercultural knowledge,intercultural communication skills and intercultural consciousness.The intercultural knowledge referred to the fact that intercultural communicators must have sufficient relevant knowledge so that they achieve effective communication.While the intercultural skills referred to the ability of intercultural communicators to implore knowledge flexibly to solve intercultural communication problems on the premise of mastering certain intercultural communication knowledge.The intercultural consciousness referred to the fact that people who learned other languages not only mastered all kinds of relevant knowledge of the language flexibly,but also showed excellent communication competence.In the post-test,the average ratio of acquiring intercultural knowledge was 12.05:14.15,the intercultural communication skills was 7.75:10.87,and the intercultural consciousness was 8.10:11.25.The theoretical implications of the research results reflected in two aspects:the research participants of the thesis are the junior middle school students,which expanded the scope of ICC research in terms of the diversity of the participants.On the other hand,intercultural knowledge,intercultural skills and intercultural consciousness are the research targets without the attempt to cover other factors in this thesis;therefore,the present study is more focused.Besides,there are also three practical implications.Firstly,newspaper reading enriches the classroom reading content and variety.Secondly,the integration of the newspaper reading enhances the students’ interest in English learning with the up-to-date stories.Finally,the improvement of the students’ ICC through reading enhances the students’ passion for other components of classroom English teaching and learning such as listening,speaking and writing.