An Investigation of Learners’ Perception of an Online Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) Training Model

Abstract

Developing students’ Intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has been viewed as the English as a foreign language teachers’ responsibility in the globalized world, especially after the birth of COVID-19 pandemic. Amidst the flourishing development of ICC cultivation studies, a noted absence is on the study of how to actualize ICC in the online teaching based English language teaching. This study, by presenting a pedagogical case, explores the application of the online ICC training model, and focuses on how the online teaching can be established at the four teaching stages, namely, attitude development, knowledge construction, skills practice, and reflection. Attitude development is a pre-class activity to motivate students’ learning curiosity. In the stage of knowledge construction, various kinds of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are selected as teaching resources for students to learn the key concepts and theories for the course. Skills practice requires students to make full use of WeChat or Bulletin Board System (BBS) to have online intercultural encounter, in this process students practice both their linguistic and intercultural communicative competence. The last stage provides chances for both students and teacher to rethink about their learning and teaching and move to the new circle of teaching stages. An eight-weeks’ action research with a class of second-grade English Majors in a Chinese university has been conducted. Questionnaire and interview are the main methods for data collection, combined with teacher and students’ reflective journals. The results of both quantitative and qualitative evaluation show that adopting online-teaching may serve as an effective way to develop students’ ICC during epidemic and in the future.