Developing College Students’ Intercultural Competence in the Context of Chinese Culture Inheritance and Dissemination—A Case Study of the Intercultural Communication Course Design for ESL Students

Abstract

Inheriting Chinese cultural genes and disseminating excellent Chinese culture has nowadays become important moral education goals of the new liberal arts in China’s colleges and universities, and intercultural competence is the prerequisite for inheriting and spreading the excellent Chinese culture. The development of intercultural competence among college students, therefore, becomes the contemporary mission of foreign language education in China’s colleges and universities. Moral education, or the ideological and political education construction of foreign language courses mainly involves the following aspects: the analysis of the course’s basic situation, the setting of teaching aims and objectives, the design of teaching philosophies and ideological and political contents, the application of teaching materials and technologies, the design of the teaching process and instructional strategies, and the assessment and reflection of teaching. This paper, by taking the design of an Intercultural Communication course from the above aspects for ESL students in a Chinese university as an example, discusses the development of college students’ intercultural competence in the context of Chinese cultural inheritance and dissemination.