The Cultivation of Critical Thinking Skills in Intercultural Communication Course

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.