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olt(1997) view language not just as one cultural trait among many but rather as the directexpression of a people's national character, and as such as culture in a kind of condensedform. So from what have been discussed above, it can be inferred that both Englishlanguage learning and English culture learning are necessary components of acquiringintercultural communicative competence. In other words, the mastery of interculturalcommunicative competence requires not only mastering the foreign language, but alsoknowing well the foreign culture.However, a lot of English learners and teachers in China think that the learning of aforeign language means only mastering the pronunciation, grammar, words, phrases,idioms and so on. Due to this kind of misunderstanding, for many years Englisheducation has been only focusing on developing learners’ linguistic competence.Therefore, it’s not surprising to find that lots of so-called excellent and successfullearners often encounter troubles or difficulties when communicating with nativespeakers, even though they can get high scores in various English tests. Of course,there’s no doubt that learners should master English linguistic knowledge well, which isa basic goal of foreign language teaching in China; however, in order to acquire goodintercultural communicative ability, learners should also have the basic culturalbackground knowledge of English-speaking countries.The close connection between language and culture has been probably noted as farback as the classical period. With the development of modern research on humancommunication, the connection between language and culture has been confirmed. As amatter of fact, any kind of language is always closely related to its culture such asreligion, history, political system, social background and so on. Language and cultureare inseparable since language is deeply rooted in its culture, language is the carrier ofculture, and culture is the source of language. Therefore, besides mastering foreignlanguages; learners also need to learn foreign cultures well, which could help learnersbetter understand foreign cultures and re-appreciate their own culture. Only in this way,can learners’ intercultural communicative competence be really improved. It can benoted that, to some extent, the mastery of intercultural communicative competence isrelated to the way in which learners treat the foreign culture.There are many factors that attribute to influence English learners’ successfulmastery of intercultural communicative competence, among which four aspects areimportant, namely they are: learners’ cognitive development; learners’ competence onlearning; learners’ age, gender and their families’ social status; and learners’ ethnicity.Some researches which are conducted in foreign countries show that ethnicity is themost influencing one of the above-mentioned four factors. In 1999, Ellis points out thatit’s widely believed that ethnicity has a significant influence on the second languagelearning. As for the relationship between ethnicity and learners’ achievements, there arethree different opinions: a normative view, a socio—psychological view and asocio—structural view. Lambert and Gardner (1972), who are in favor ofsocio—psychological view, propose that learners’ attitudes toward language learning areclosely related to their viewpoints toward the culture. In addition, one of the conclusionsderived from these studies is that learners’ attitudes toward target culture learni