| Globalization has made the whole world an interconnected community.Cooperation and communication between China and other countries in the world are becoming more and more frequent.English,as a language commonly spoken around the world,is playing its growing function in the global cultural transmission and communication.The National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017 version,revised in 2020)clearly emphasizes that teachers should focus not only on cultivating students’ language knowledge and skills,but also on their intercultural communicative competence(ICC).High school is a crucial stage for the students to form their worldview and values,and during this stage it is essential to develop their ICC.In this context of the changing world,the author uses Byram’s ICC model as a theoretical framework and adopts the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the following questions:(1)How well do high school students develop ICC from the perspective of four aspects: knowledge,attitude,skills and awareness?(2)What are the difficulties in cultivating high school students’ ICC?(3)What are the main factors that influence the improvement of students’ ICC?In this study,220 high school students and 20 English teachers in a certain high school in Nanning were selected as the research subjects.Firstly,in order to better understand the status of high school students’ ICC,the author conducted questionnaires and tests.Then,the author conducted questionnaires and interviews with English teachers in order to learn about their understanding of ICC and any challenges they were faced with in their intercultural teaching.Next,the author made classroom observation for a month.Finally,the data obtained were statistically analyzed using SPSS 26.0 and Excel.The conclusions are as follows:(1)The overall development of high school students’ ICC is average,and not up to the desired level.However,they perform better in terms of intercultural attitudes and awareness than intercultural knowledge and skills.(2)There are several difficulties in cultivating high school students’ ICC:Teachers do not pay enough attention to ICC and have low intercultural awareness;their teaching approaches are not diverse enough;their time for intercultural teaching is insufficient;their teaching lacks communicative situation and the evaluation system is not complete.(3)The influencing factors include four main aspects.The educational administration lacks intercultural training for teachers,and does not have ICC incorporated into the evaluation system.Schools are outdated in terms of their educational ideologies,and need to strengthen their sense of intercultural education as a “soft power” tool.Teachers have a vague concept of intercultural teaching,a lack of professional knowledge of intercultural teaching,a meager command of new teaching methods,and an unreasonable amount of time allocated to intercultural teaching.Students have weak independent learning abilities,and are hindered by native language interference.Based on the above findings,the author proposes several suggestions for intercultural teaching:(1)Education administrators should update their evaluation system and provide training in intercultural teaching for English teachers.(2)Schools should revamp their educational ideology,establish an open atmosphere for intercultural communication,and form favorable teaching communities.(3)Teachers should reflect on and renew their teaching philosophy,expand their theoretical knowledge,incorporate more cultural elements in their teaching,create more realistic intercultural scenarios,and utilize scientific methods to improve their teaching quality.(4)Students should prioritize both language knowledge and intercultural learning and take their initiative to learn more about culture. |
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