A Survey Of Intercultural Communication Competence Of Business-oriented Students

With the tempo and process of globalization becoming faster and faster, China's economic and business tie with the outside world will become closer and closer after its entry into the WTO. Catering to the development of economic globalization, China needs more talents who are qualified experts in his or her business area with strong intercultural communication competence to bear the fierce competition. The new requirement has generated unprecedented challenges to the teaching of English in China. Many years ago, a scholar named Wang Zhenya conducted a survey among some English majors and the results showed that the participants' language competence was not correlated with their social-cultural competence. Enlightened by the abovementioned study, the author of this thesis designed an intercultural communication competence questionnaire according to the current situations of Chinese students' English language competence and their intercultural communication competence and the intercultural communication competence theory proposed by a prestigious scholar named Young Yun Kim in 2001. This questionnaire was sent to over 170 business-oriented college students majoring in business studies and business English in two prestigious universities featuring mainly in commerce. By using this quantitative analysis method, the author intends to find out whether the intercultural communication competence of students majoring in business studies and business English is correlated with their English language competence and tries to answer some other related questions. The author hopes that this survey will be enlightening for future practices in the teaching of English and intercultural communication competence issues concerned in the English teaching field. At the same time, the author also hopes that this effort will generate further and thorough studies in the related fields.