4.4 Optional courses 11

4.5 The results and discussions of interviews 12

5. Conclusion 15

References 16

Appendix 18

1. Introduction

Globalization, international conflict and security, environmental challenges, world health issues, shifting populations and so many international issues have made intercultural communication a necessity (Samovar et al., 2012). Thus bilateral understanding and intercultural communicative competence are very important in today’s global world, because they allow us to overcome prejudice, discrimination and misunderstandings between people of different cultural backgrounds. A growing number of articles, monographs and textbooks about intercultural communication have been published in China since intercultural communication studies were introduced in the early 1980s. Developing students’ intercultural communicative competence is the primary task of foreign language teaching. (Bi Jiwan 2005:66). 

And there are so many scholars who have studied the current situation of developing the middle school students’ intercultural communicative competence. And most of the students lack the ability to have intercultural communication. In the aspect of time concept, conversational principle, nonlinguistic behavior, etc., the situation is much grimmer. (Fu Yonggang and Li Tianxing, 2003). To be sure, these problems will definitely influence students’ communication with foreigners, even worse, cause some bad consequences. In their survey, nonlinguistic factor accounts for much among eight aspects that are related to culture, from which we can see that we emphasized a lot on teaching the language itself, such as grammar and vocabulary, in traditional foreign language teaching, but ignored the culture background. It also means that the development of middle school students’ intercultural communicative competence is far from enough. There is no doubt that the existing circumstance is inconsistent with the goal of foreign language teaching and learning. 

As a key private school, Hangzhou Greentown Yuhua School is famous for its various intercultural programs among the schools in Hangzhou. Thus this paper is based on the study of how Hangzhou Greentown Yuhua middle school creates the unique school spirit to develop students’ intercultural communicative competence. Together with Hwa Chong Institution and Raffles Institution in Singapore, the Windsor School in America, Lynfield College in New Zealand, Hangzhou Greentown Yuhua School and other internationally known schools are sister schools, which provide a wide range of intercultural communication opportunities for their students. 

The author has been in Hangzhou Greentown Yuhua School as practice teacher for about three months. And she has witnessed the great occasion of Yuhua’s annual ceremony- International Culture Festival, and experienced the cultural atmosphere in the campus. The author focuses on the extracurricular activities and international programs in the school and analyzes the importance of those activities, because in addition to meeting the fundamental goal of enhancing middle school students’ ability to have intercultural communication in classroom teaching, school spirit which fosters in variable intercultural activities holds a crucial position in the development of middle school students’ multicultural integration.

An observation which lasted three months was made in Hangzhou Greentown Yuhua middle school. Meanwhile, structured oral interviews with ten students in the school and documental analysis about the school’s events were conducted, with the objective of exploring the following problems:

1. In addition to foreign language teaching, what programs and activities does the school design to develop the students’ intercultural communicative competence?