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In the past few decades, our world has experienced enormous changes due to the rapid development of information communication technology, internationalization and globalization. In response to these changes, intercultural communication has become the central focus of foreign language education in the West in which the pragmatic use of the foreign language is emphasized and promoted.

Following these trends, the intercultural communication perspective has drawn the attention of Chinese scholars and gradually became one of the controversial issues in the teaching of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL). During the debate, a consensus has now been reached that intercultural communication should be a key feature of CFL education and “culture and communication” is placed as one of the main modules in CFL teachers’ education. However, most of the present research in this area is still remains only on the theoretical level. The practical implementation of the intercultural communication perspective remains an open field for scholars and teachers to explore.

In order to explore practical ways of implementing intercultural communication theory in CFL education, this paper investigates four questions: (1) What does “intercultural communication” mean in the teaching of CFL? (2) What are the elements of culture in the Chinese language? (3) How can the framework of intercultural communicative competence be implemented into present-day education of CFL? (4) How can the effectiveness of applying intercultural communicative competence theory in CFL be measured?

In order to provide answers to these questions, the paper presents an action research designed to revise an existing CFL course for beginners and aims to investigate the scope of possibilities and the limitations in implementing the intercultural communication approach in the CFL teaching and learning. The paper also presents a pilot study serving as a valuable reference and a stepping-stone towards more comprehensive research.