A Comparative Study On The Intercultural Communicative Competence Of Non-English-major EFL Learners In Different Contexts

With the development of globalization and internationalization in the 21^st century, English, as a lingua franca, has taken the role of international communication tool;Then the international communication in English involves both native-nonnative and nonnative-nonnative discourse participants (Alptekin 2002). Therefore, fostering EFL learners' ICC (intercultural communicative competence) ought to become an intense concern of EFL teaching (teaching English as a foreign language) and the realization of it should be the aim of English teaching in China. Zhang (1994) and Wang (2005) have done some researches about the Chinese university EFL learners' ICC development and found out there is little correlation between ICC level and English proficiency. Then is the external context of intercultural communication (the probability for the EFL learners to contact with the foreigners) a potential factor to influence the EFL learners' ICC development? Based on Byram's model of ICC a comparative research on non-English majors' ICC was done in this M.A. thesis in two cities of different contexts in order to find out the answer to this question.In this research one hundred and ninety-three EFL learners of non-English majors were chosen from two parallel universities in two districts with differentcontexts of intercultural communication, and the comparison was made between these two universities to find out whether there were any significant differences in the respondents' status quo of ICC with the main instrument of the survey — questionnaire which was designed according to Byram's model. After the analysis of the main quantitative data with the statistical software SPSS the following findings were obtained:1. The present level of the non-English majors' ICC is not high and unsatisfactory for the real-time intercultural communication in both universities despite the different contexts of intercultural interaction.2. There is no significant difference in the non-English majors' ICC status quo between these two different contexts of intercultural communication.3. The non-English majors' ICC construct of the four dimensions (critical awareness, attitude, skills and knowledge) (Byram 1997) in these two universities are similar to each other.These findings suggest that for the present the context of intercultural communication exerts little influence on the non-English majors' ICC development mainly because of their absence in the experience of intercultural interaction and a dearth of cultural knowledge. In addition, some suggestions are also made for further study and EFL teaching.