Cultivation of EFL Learners’Intercultural Competence

Nowadays, educators from home and abroad believe that learning a foreign language means learning a great deal of the foreign civilization and culture. And the utmost goal of language teaching is to cultivate EFL learners'communicative competence, but not merely the linguistic knowledge. Thus, teaching a foreign language is more than teaching new words, expressions and grammar rules, but should also incorporate the target culture elements into language knowledge. In order to improve EFL learners'English proficiency, teachers must make efforts to cultivate EFL learners'intercultural competence and promote their sensibility and adaptability to the differences between Chinese culture and the Western culture. Only by doing so, can EFL learners communicate with native speakers appropriately and smoothly. This paper proposes some effective teaching techniques and methods that can be applied in English classroom to cultivate Chinese EFL learners'intercultural competence.