The Cultivation of Critical Thinking Skills in Intercultural Communication Course分析和总结分析和总结.docx

The Cultivation of Critical Thinking Skills in Intercultural Communication Course Supported by Education Reform Funds of Beijing Municipal Education Committee Project Name “Enhancing Language Output Ability， Teaching Innovative， Excellent Engineers” （GJJG201402）. Received 18 December 2014； accepted 12 February 2015 Published online 31 March 2015 Abstract： The cultivation of critical thinking skills and intercultural communication competence have been put on list of top priorities in the current English teaching and education reform. The 2000 version of Higher Education Teaching Syllabus for English Majors stresses the importance of cultivating independent thinking and innovative skills， and also emphasizes the significance of incorporating students’ cultural sensitivity， flexibility to meet the demands of increasingly widespread international communication. Moreover， fostering intercultural communication competence is an important part of developing critical thinking skills， and these two are correlated in the process of language teaching. This paper explores how to integrate the cultivation of critical thinking skills and intercultural communication competence in intercultural communication course by proposing two pedagogical approaches to teaching culture： critical pedagogy and comparison pedagogy. Key words： Critical thinking skills； Intercultural communication competence； Critical pedagogy； Comparative pedagogy CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION COMPETENCE Critical thinking is recognized as an important competence for students to acquire in academic language （Connolly， 2000； Davidson，1998；Davidson Dunham，1997）. Sun（2011） suggests three key reasons for cultivating critical thinking skills in China. First， it is the core target of China Higher Education. Second， it is the communal commission of world class universities. One of the missions of Harvard University is rejoice in discovery and critical thought； one of the key values of Cambridge