A Study On The Scale Of Intercultural Communicative Competence For Chinese College Students

The study mainly focuses on the construction of the Scale of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICCS) for Chinese college students. Researches on language proficiency scales (LPS) abroad are abundant with a history of more than sixty years. However, most researches in China mainly focus on the introduction of the methods and procedures of developing foreign LPS or their advantages and disadvantages. As an important sub-proficiency of language abilities,intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has been relatively neglected in China. What's more, different teaching and testing syllabuses are lack of a common standard on ICC. Since 2014, Chinese Ministry of Education has been devoting itself to constructing the China Standards of English (CSE). Under such background comes out this thesis whose research subject is Chinese college students and whose research purpose is to build an ICCS.Based on Communicative Language Ability (Bachman, 1990) and Intercultural Communicative Competence Theory (Chen Guoming &Starosta, 1996), this thesis tries to answer the following two questions: 1)What are the dimensions of ICCS for Chinese college students? 2) What are the levels of ICCS for Chinese college students? In order to find answers to the above two questions, we take the following research procedures: firstly, we collect 188 related descriptors mainly from LPS,journals, teaching and testing syllabuses at home and abroad. Secondly,we edit these descriptors under the guidance of five principles, namely,positiveness, definiteness, clarity, brevity and independence, and editing methods includes deleting, translating, rewriting, splitting and combining. As a result, 77 descriptors are left after editing. Then,descriptors are classified into three dimensions according to Intercultural Communicative Competence Theory (Chen Guoming & Starosta, 1996).And the preliminary classification of descriptors is validated by intra-rater and inter-rater consistency test. Next, 77 descriptors are initially divided into five levels either by referring to the expert experience or by referring to the original positions of descriptors in the source scales. Finally, 25 experienced college English teachers are invited to judge the difficulty level of each descriptor and the results are analyzed by Multi-facet Rasch Model (MFRM) to set the final levels for the descriptors.The results are as follows: 1) ICCS for Chinese college students can be divided into three dimensions: emotion, cognition and behavior; 2)ICCS for Chinese college students is found to have four levels. It is expected that this thesis can offer reference to the construction of CSE,at the same time, can provide guidance for Chinese college English teaching, learning and assessment.