The concept of communication competence was conceptualized by Ruben (1976: 336) as “the ability to function in a manner that is perceived to be relatively consistent with the needs, capacities, goals, and expectations of the inpiduals in one’s environment while satisfying one’s own needs, capacities, goals, and expectations”.

It was also defined by Canale and Swain (1980) in terms of four components: sociolinguistic competence, grammatical competence, strategic competence and discourse competence. The sociolinguistic competence refers to the usage of the appropriate utterances in particular social settings. The grammatical competence refers to the speaker’s grammatical knowledge of their language such as pronunciation, spelling, intonation, sentence structure, word-formation and sentence combining, etc. The strategic competence refers to the usage of communicative strategies to compensate for gaps in communication. The discourse competence refers to the ability to combine ideas to achieve cohesion in form and in thought.   

2.3 Intercultural communicative competence

Fantini (2010:1) defines intercultural communicative competence as “a complex system of abilities needed to perform effectively and appropriately when interacting with others who are linguistically and culturally different from oneself. Whereas “effective” relates to one’s own view of one’s performance in the LC2 (i.e., an “etic” or an outsider’s view of the host culture); “appropriate” relates to how one’s performance is perceived by one’s hosts (i.e., an “emic” or insider’s view)”. Similarly, Deardorff (2006: 241–266) defines intercultural communicative competence as “the ability to communicate effectively and appropriately in intercultural situations based on one’s intercultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes”. Spizberg (2000: 375) suggests that it is “Behavior that is appropriate and effective in a given context”. Wiseman (2002:208) defines intercultural communicative competence as the knowledge, motivation and skills to interact effectively and appropriately with members of different cultures. Perry and Southwell (2011:455) point out that many scholars have defined intercultural communicative competence. Though there is no general acceptance, all the scholars agree that intercultural communicative competence is the ability to communicate with people from different culture background appropriately and effectively.

Intercultural communicative competence is an extension of language communicative competence, which takes account of the intercultural aspect of foreign language use (Mughan, 1999: 62). Byram’s (1997) model of intercultural communicative competence categorizes the skills and knowledge relevant to the acquisition of intercultural competence: knowledge, attitudes, skills of discovery/interaction, and skills of interpreting and critical cultural awareness. According to him, there is an inextricable link between ability to function effectively in a language and intercultural communicative competence.

Intercultural education in foreign language teaching is a training goal and selection of teaching content 

and materials determined by the school through curriculum. And it is an educational activity about the development of students’ personal world view, values, identity, intercultural communicative awareness and competence by updating teaching philosophy, teaching methods and teaching design (Zhang Hongling, 2012: 4). Zhang Weidong and Yang Li pointed out that the development of students’ intercultural communicative competence should starts from three dimensions: "cultural knowledge", "cultural awareness" and "communicative practice". All together, they build mutually linking and mutually restraint intercultural communication system (Zhang Weidong and Yang Li, 2012: 10).