A Correlation Study On Chinese Non-english Majors' Intercultural Communicative Competence And Language Proficiency

In the field of foreign language teaching(FLT),a consensus has been reached that cultivating students' intercultural communicative competence(ICC)is the ultimate goal.This emphasizes the importance of ‘intercultural education'.The concept ‘ICC' has been studied by scholars both abroad and at home from three perspectives: firstly,scholars paid much attention to the definition of ICC.Secondly,scholars concentrated on the componential research of ICC in which components of ICC framework have been listed in detail.Thirdly,ICC development attracted much attention,with students studying abroad and immigrants as the objects of study.Much work has been done to conduct the investigation of the status quo of their ICC,while no agreement has been reached on the correlation between language proficiency(LP)and ICC,which are the two basic elements of FLT.Therefore,the correlation research between LP and ICC is still worth exploring.In the thesis,three questions are focused.a)What is the status quo of Chinese non-English majors' ICC? b)How does Chinese non-English majors' LP correlate with their ICC in general? c)How does Chinese non-English majors' LP correlate with their ICC components,namely,intercultural awareness,intercultural sensitivity and intercultural effectiveness?280 Chinese non-English freshmen from different majors of a university in Northeast China take part in the investigation.The students are tested by three questionnaires created by Chen and Starosta with each questionnaire evaluating one dimension of ICC.The measurement of the students' LP is based on the scores of participants' CET4.Descriptive and correlation analysis is conducted by the software SPSS.17.0.As a result,several tables are presented.The results of the research are:(1)a large majority of the participants' ICC is in the medium level,and a large majority of the students' IA,IS and IE are located in the medium level.(2)There is no significant correlation between LP and ICC in general.(3)LP is more correlative with IS.Among the five elements of IS,intercultural confidence has a relatively higher correlation with LP.Message skills,as one of the six elements of IE is more correlated with LP.IS gets a higher Pearson correlation coefficient with LP,to be specific,intercultural confidence and message skills are also relatively correlated with LP.This leads to the conclusion that LP development can achieve better results by lying importance on IS enhancement,intercultural confidence building,and message skill training.