A Study On Present Situation Of Part-time College Students' Socio-cultural Competence In The Chinese Context

Communication always takes place in a certain cultural context and the success of communication depends on the participants'Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC), which includes cultural knowledge and cultural awareness. Since the beginning of the study of intercultural communication in the 1980s, many scholars have already carried out socio-cultural test for college students in order to test their ICC. Wang Zhenya (1990) and Zhong Hua (2001) administered socio-cultural test to English major students and non-English major students respectively and found that there is no direct correlation between students'foreign language competence and ICC. Based on those former studies, this thesis makes a tentative study on the present situation of the part-time college students'socio-cultural competence in the Chinese context. The author studied the relation between socio-cultural competence and cultural context of the part-time college students and put forward some tentative suggestions for improving their ICC.The study adopts the research method of quantitative analysis. The author selected 100 part-time college students at random in Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), and all of the students have not passed CET-4, and most of them have had jobs while having classes only at weekend. The socio-cultural competence test is modified on the basis of Wang Zhenya's The Analysis of Socio-cultural Test published in Foreign Language Teaching and Study Vol. 4, 1990. The author put forward two research questions at the beginning of the study:1) What's the present situation of part-time college students'socio-cultural competence in the Chinese context?2) What's the strongest and the weakest socio-cultural competence of the part-time college students?Both of these two questions were answered at the end of the study. On the basis of the statistic analysis, the author finds: 1) The part-time college students are deficient in non-verbal behaviors. 2) The part-time college students achieved higher score on informal culture than that on formal culture. 3) The part-time college students did better in terms of social convention knowledge than that of literature, religion and value. Based on the findings, the author also put forward some tentative suggestions for improving part-time college students'socio-cultural competence as pedagogical implications of the study. The suggestions are given from four perspectives, namely cultural syllabus design, developing culture-oriented courses and corresponding teaching materials, making full use of foreign teachers and extra-class activities.As a conclusion, the author put forward some suggestions for future studies, the researchers could focus on detailed suggestions which could help developing the part-time college students'ICC; put the emphasis on the part-time college students'non-verbal communicative competence to find more effective ways to develop learners'ICC and pay attention to the part-time college students'other competences during intercultural communication.