Innovation in Language Learning

Intercultural communicative language teaching (ICLT) is becoming well established and has gained wider recognition in education systems in many parts of the world. As a result, the ultimate goal of foreign language (FL) education is being shifted from communicative competence (CC) to intercultural communicative competence (ICC). To find out the current situation of ICLT in the tertiary education in China, a nation-wide survey was conducted of university EFL teachers’ perception of ICLT and their teaching practices.The purpose of the present study is to find out Chinese EFL teachers’ beliefs in, attitudes and practices of ICLT. It aims to answer the following research questions: 1) How do they conceptualize the ultimate goal of intercultural language teaching--- intercultural communicative competence? 2) What are their beliefs about the objectives of foreign language teaching? 3) What are their beliefs about culture teaching in foreign language education? To what extent have EFL teachers in China recognized the importance of intercultural language teaching? 4) What methods have they adopted for cultivating students’ ICC? The results revealed that despite the recognition of the importance of ICC, the respondents’ understanding of ICC remained insufficient and even inaccurate. Cultural teaching activities were mainly focused on noticing and comparing, while interacting and reflecting were very much neglected. The teaching practices of the participants were still characterized by communicative language teaching, pointing to the need for teacher training in this respect and an ideological shift from CLT to ICLT.