The Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) features a high degree of openness to the outside world and the agglomerated development of cross‑border trade, advanced manufacturing, and modern service industries, which imposes an urgent practical demand for the English intercultural communicative competence of high‑level technical and skilled talents. As a new type of education within China’s modern vocational education system, vocational undergraduate universities entrust College English courses with the important task of synergistically cultivating students’ language proficiency, cultural literacy, and professional application abilities. Existing domestic and international studies have accumulated some research on Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) in the field of vocational education; however, most domestic studies remain at the level of macroscopic strategy discussions and lack empirical investigations targeted at the vocational undergraduate context in the GBA, while foreign studies focus on overseas Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) and fail to provide specific attention to China’s unique vocational undergraduate education type. This study takes 25 College English teachers from a vocational undergraduate university in the GBA as survey subjects and conducts an empirical investigation using questionnaires, systematically examining the current status of teaching practices in College English intercultural communicative competence. The study finds that five major practical dilemmas exist: vocational undergraduate English teachers have biased perceptions of the intercultural needs of industrial talents in the GBA; teaching objectives are overly generalized and localized teaching resources are scarce; classroom instruction remains dominated by traditional lectures with insufficient immersive intercultural practice; participation in industry‑education integration is low; and assessment tools for ICC are lacking. Based on the trinity cultivation logic of “language‑culture‑profession”, this paper proposes practical pathways adapted to the industrial needs of the GBA from five dimensions: reconstruction of teaching objectives, development of localized teaching resources, innovation of classroom teaching models, construction of a dual‑qualified teacher team, and establishment of a multidimensional and diversified evaluation system. This study aims to provide empirical references for the reform of College English courses in vocational undergraduate universities in the GBA and to serve the supply of internationally oriented technical and skilled talents for the region.

Yihua Chen. Cultivation of English Intercultural Communicative Competence in Vocational Undergraduate Universities in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area: Current Situation, Challenges, and Pathways. Frontiers in Educational Research (2026), Vol. 9, Issue 8: 129-137. https://doi.org/10.25236/FER.2026.090817.

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