A Study On Cultivating Junior High School Students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence Based On The Production-Oriented Approach

Intercultural communicative competence(ICC)plays a critical role in developing junior high school students’ key competencies.Therefore,the cultivation of students’ ICC has been highly valued in compulsory education.The English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022 Edition)emphasizes the development of junior high school students’ ICC as one part of the overall objectives of the curriculum,highlighting the significance of ICC.However,junior high school English teaching has long focused on the improvement of students’ language proficiency while overlooking the cultivation of their ICC.Therefore,based on the Production-Oriented Approach(POA),this study focuses on the dimensions of knowledge,attitudes,skills,and awareness of Byram’s ICC model and explores how to effectively cultivate junior school students’ ICC in English listening and speaking classes.This study conducts an empirical research on English listening and speaking classes teaching guided by Byram’s ICC model and POA.Starting from exploring the current situation of ICC cultivation in English listening and speaking classes for junior high school students,the study involves 53 ninth-grade students and 10 English teachers from a junior high school as research subjects.The study applies interview and questionnaire as research methods and conducts a 16-week empirical study to address the following three questions:(1)What are the specific problems of junior high school students’ ICC cultivation in English listening and speaking classes teaching?(2)What are the effects of POA-based English listening and speaking classes teaching on junior high school students’ ICC in the dimensions of knowledge,attitudes,skills and awareness?(3)How do teachers and students evaluate the teaching effectiveness of cultivating junior high school students’ ICC during English listening and speaking classes teaching guided by POA?This study employs SPSS 26.0 and Excel 2016 to perform statistical analysis and contrast on the collected data before and after the experiment,and draws the following results:(1)The specific problems in cultivating junior high school students’ ICC in English listening and speaking classes teaching are: teachers’ unclear understanding of ICC,the unsatisfactory effect of traditional teaching methods,insufficient emphasis on ICC cultivation from teachers and lack of real communicative environments.(2)The POA-based English listening and speaking classes teaching has a positive effect on the improvement of junior high school students’ ICC.Specifically,the knowledge dimension has the greatest improvement,followed by the skills dimension,while there is no significant improvement on the attitudes and awareness dimension.(3)The POA-based English listening and speaking classes teaching is favored by both teachers and students to cultivate junior high school students’ ICC.According to the results presented above,this research posits that POA is effective for cultivating ICC among junior high school students in listening and speaking classes teaching.Meanwhile,this study draws on the three key steps of “motivating”,“enabling”and “assessing” in the teaching procedures of POA to derive the following three practical implications:(1)Creating authentic intercultural communicative scenarios;(2)Selecting appropriate intercultural input materials;(3)Utilizing effective assessments for students’ intercultural outputs.