A Study On Full-time Adult Efl Juniors' Intercultural Communicative Competence

As far as the contemporary Chinese education system is concerned,full-time adult students have always been neglected by both English education circle and researchers. A statistic collected from CNKI(China National Knowledge Infrastructure) (1999-2008) shows that the number of available researches concerning "English teaching to adult students" is 951,while the researches on culture teaching are extremely limited.Present study holds that full-time adult education is an integral part of higher education,and the cultivation of full-time adult students' intercultural communicative competence(ICC) should not be neglected.The cultivation of students' ICC has become the final goal of foreign language education.It is generally recognized that ICC should involve target linguistic competence and target culture competence(Hymes,1972;Byram,1997;Hu Wenzhong, 1997;Wang Zhenya,2005 et al.).This study is,therefore,undertaken to survey the full-time adult EFL juniors' target culture competence and further looks into the current situation of their ICC.All subjects have passed English Qualification Test for a Bachelor's Degree(EQTBD),which can assure that their linguistic competence is qualified to a certain degree.The research questions to be addressed in the study are as follows:1) What is the current situation of full-time adult EFL juniors' target culture competence?2) Are students' linguistic competence and target culture competence are equally developed?3) What are the underling factors responsible for the current situation of students' target culture competence?This study employed a mixed design:a quantitative design and a qualitative design.62 full-time adult students from Jiangsu University involved in the study,and they are random sampled from the population of students who have passed EQTBD in Jiangsu University.The selection of these subjects is out of two considerations:one is that they have finished the two years' learning of college English,the other is that they have passed EQTBD.The quantitative research involves a Socio-cultural Test designed by Wang Zhenya(1997) and a questionnaire of Intercultural Sensitivity Scale designed by Chen Guoming and Starosta(2000).The qualitative research employs a semi-structured interview,and the 10 subjects are stratified-random sampled. Quantitative data was analyzed by the software SPSS 12.0.The major findings are as follows:Firstly,the testing results of non-verbal behavior,verbal behavior and cultural knowledge shows that subjects' achievements in all the three parts are rather low,thus students' target culture competence is weak.The correlation analysis to the achievements of the three parts shows that they are not correlated,and they are significantly different from one another,which implies that the cultivation of students' ICC should be carried out from the three dimensions as a whole,rather than focusing on the individual one.Secondly,subjects' target culture competence lags behind their linguistic competence,and their ICC is unsatisfactory in general.The achievements of subjects' target culture competence and linguistic competence are not correlated,and they are significantly different.It is,therefore,necessary to integrate culture teaching with language teaching so as to cultivate students' ICC.Thirdly,based on the questionnaire of Intercultural Sensitivity Scale and interview, present study also looks into the embodied factors responsible for students' current situation of target culture competence.From teachers' aspect,they neglected target culture teaching in full-time adult EFL classroom.From students' aspect,they do not realize the importance of culture learning,and their English learning is examination-oriented.They lack of interaction engagement,interaction confidence, and interaction enjoyment and also interaction attentiveness.The major pedagogical Implications are as follows.Firstly,there is urgent need to integrate the requirement of ICC into the syllabus of adult EFL education.Secondly, language teaching and culture teaching should be treated as equally important.Present study is by no means perfect.Firstly,due to the limited condition,all the subjects are from Jiangsu University,and the number of subjects is not very large,so it might not ensure that the survey could represent the whole population of full-time adult students.Secondly,the number of interviewees is limited,so they may not represent the whole population of full-time adult students who have passed EQTBD.