Situated in Byram’s intercultural competence model, this study employed survey questionnaires and face-to-face interviews to investigate the current situation of Chinese college students’ intercultural competence through exploring a class of English majors. The results show that students were not satisfied with their reported intercultural competence; their desire for cultural learning was constrained by the current language teaching methods and content. Suggestions are made on how to position culture in language teaching and learning with implications for how teachers could provide more opportunities for authentic intercultural learning and prepare students to participate as global citizens.
As an important part of social life and interpersonal cooperation, politeness is reflected in languages. Movie review is a typical form of writing that reflects people's application of politeness strategies consciously or unconsciously. Under the frame of the politeness strategies theory proposed by Brown and Levinson, this paper presents the differences on positive and negative politeness strategies used between English and Chinese movie reviewers. With the selected five famous movies and ten corresponding movie reviews, including five English and five Chinese reviews, the writer discusses the application of positive and negative politeness strategies. Although the difference on frequency of the application of positive and negative politeness strategies within each group is not obvious, the use of specific strategy is different between Chinese and English reviewers. This research also tries to find out the possible reasons of the differences.
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