Research On Status Quo And Countermeasures Of Liberal Arts Students And Science Students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence

Intercultural communicative competence (ICC) is a necessary quality for Englishlearners in this new period, and it has attracted many scholars’ attention from different fields.College students are considered as important educational talents that shoulder the major tasksof communicating with western countries about science and culture. Therefore, it is essentialto cultivate and develop college students’ ICC. However, most of researchers attachimportance to empirical studies of non-English major students’ ICC and only a few of themfocus on the status quo of Liberal Arts students and Science students’ ICC. Thus, this thesis isdevoted to investigating the current situation of Liberal Arts students and Science students’ICC, making comparison with these two groups, and proposing some tentativecountermeasures about enhancing ICC.Based on the statements above, this research adopts Young Yun Kim’s ICC models,which include three dimensions, namely, cognitive competence, affective competence andbehavioral competence, to investigate the status quo of120students, who are made up of60Liberal Arts students and60Science students. The questionnaire is connected with Fantini(1995) and Yang Yang’s design (2009), among which quantitative and qualitative analysis willbe used to describe the data in aid of SPSS13.O. The whole thesis is dedicated to discussingthe status quo of subjects’ ICC, their differences between them, some problems related to ICCand the causes’ analysis for it. The results show that1) generally speaking, Liberal Artsstudents’ ICC is better than Science students;2) in detail, cognitive competence andbehavioral competence of Liberal Arts students are more satisfactory than Science studentsand significant differences can be seen, while there are no significant differences betweenthem in affective competence;3) the factors that influence the ICC of Liberal Arts studentsand Science students mainly include insufficient input of culture teaching, insufficientpragmatic knowledge, insufficient communication strategies and insufficient interculturalexperiences.