On the afternoon of November 7, the School of Foreign Languages held in Room 303 of the Sanshan Building an open class of “Intercultural Communication”, an optional course available to undergraduates of the whole university. The demo lecture was jointly given by a Chinese and a foreign teacher, namely Ms Zhuang Xiaomin at the English Education Department and Mr Will from the UK. A number of faculty members of the School of Foreign Languages observed the open class and conducted a lively discussion on it after class.
The lecture titled “Children’s Television Programs-a cross-cultural perspective” was mainly devoted to cultivating students’ intercultural communicative competence and critical thinking ability. In the lecture, Ms Zhuang Xiaomin and Mr Will jointly analyzed the figures, sounds, words, titles and other symbolic information with the multimodal and the “visual grammar” theory, exploring the cultural differences between the Chinese and the English language, prompting students to think both deeply and critically and tapping the cultural roots underlying the language differences. Finally, the two teachers instructed their students to further explore and summarize the teaching content with the intercultural theories featuring such binary oppositions as “individualism vs. Collectivism” and “patriarchal society vs. feminist society”.
Ms Zhuang Xiaomin is a key faculty member of the English Education Department with plentiful teaching experience. She has won several provincial and University-level teaching awards. In this open class, the two teachers cooperated very tacitly, interacting with each other orderly but spontaneously and presenting their lecture on the cultivation of intercultural communicative competence from the innovative perspectives of “visual grammar” and “multi-modal analysis”. This course originally designed to cultivate the comprehensive ability and professional quality of English majors now became popular with students of all the university bent on promoting their intercultural communicative competence.
(School of Foreign Languages)
Chinese
English