EFL Learners' Competence Of Cultural-specific Schema In Cross-cultural Communication

Since opening up to the outside world, China is getting more and more attention from other countries for its rapid development in economy and technology. With China'frequent contacts with the outside world, English, as an international language, is becoming more and more important in those cross-cultural interactions. Nowadays more and more Chinese college students are working hard to learn English so as to be competitive in cross-cultural interactions. However, many cross-cultural contacts turn out to be frustrating or even failures, due to diversified cultural factors. For EFL learners, culture has become one important element that influences language learning. The issue of cultural cognition directly relates to the success or failure of cross-cultural communication, to the appropriateness and accuracy of language performance.A social-cultural test was conducted in this paper to test Chinese EFL learners'competence of applying cultural schemas to cross-cultural communication. The questionnaires were designed with reference to Wang Zhenya's. The subjects were 96 first-year MS candidates at China University of Geosciences (Beijing). The writer collected the questionnaires and made a qualitative analysis by using SPSS.12. The results show uneven distribution of the students'competence in behavior, information and achievement culture. The competence of behavior was better than that of information and achievement; the understanding of verbal behavior was much better than that of non-verbal behavior and factual knowledge; both the performances of non-verbal communication and factual knowledge were very poor. The author tried to account for this problem:1. Some teachers lack the knowledge of the target culture, and hence they omit cultural information input in teaching2. There is no curriculum for culture teaching, and textbooks cannot meet the demand of cross-cultural communication.