An Exploration on the Cultivation of Intercultural Communication Competence in High Schools English Reading Based on the “The Third Place”

Abstract

The Ministry of Education promulgated Curriculum Standards for Ordinary High Schools (2017), which regulated that it is necessary to cultivate highs school students with the intercultural communication competence and the ability to spread Chinese culture. The traditional intercultural communication teaching, which is target-language oriented, has caused the phenomenon of “Aphasia of Chinese culture”. Meanwhile, the intercultural communication cultivation in high school English teaching was also simply understood as the instruction of foreign knowledge. In order to solve the problems, the idea of “the third space” theory has been chosen as the theory of cultivating students’ intercultural communicative competence. “The third space” is neither composed of the native culture nor the target language culture, but an innovative space born in the process of dynamic contact, collision and interaction between the two cultures. Based on this theory, this paper summarizes the research status of intercultural communication competence and clarifies its specific connotation, reviews the cultivation of intercultural communication competence in high school English teaching. It takes A Child of Two Cuisine (a passage from unit 1, book 2 of English textbook of FLTRP Edition) as an example to state how to apply “the third place” to the lesson design based on the activity-based English learning. But due to lack of conditions, the argumentation of this paper lacks empirical research to test its effectiveness.