The paper is part of an on-going action research on cultivating ICC through a content-based College English class Language, Culture and Communication in a comprehensive university in Beijing (Zheng & Gao, 2019). The key focus of the class is to help students change from ethnocentric to ethnorelative worldviews through four teaching steps: learning about differences, deconstructing “differences”, reconstructing knowledge and attitudes, and seeking creative solutions to communication problems. During the spring semester of 2020, the researcher has used her research findings from an Associative Group Analysis study of university students’ free association of 7 regional words (America, Italy, Japan, Korea, Iran, Hubei and Wuhan) to facilitate discussions on the influence of COVID 19 on regional stereotypes. The paper reports the teaching effects, aiming to open up a conversation among language teachers to discuss responsibility and practices in facilitating ICC during times of crisis.
 

intercultural language teaching;,stereotype,crisis,covid 19