An Investigation On Intercultural Communicative Competence Of Tourism-English Majors

Since the reform and opening up, the tourism industry has developed at a rapid rate, which has become the new growth point of national economy. The practical talents who master tourist knowledge and skills, have a good command of English and strong intercultural communicative competence, and have fine integrated quality are in short supply. But traditional academic talents cultivating model which has a fact of disconnection between teaching and practice cannot meet the demand of tourist market. In recent years, some colleges have realized the importance of developing the students' intercultural communicative competence and carried out researches on guiding concept, course offering, teaching design and textbooks.According to the reality of present tourism-English majors'English level and communicative competence, the author designed a set of questionnaires. Altogether 90 college students majoring in tourism-English from Jiangsu Institute of Economic and Trade Technology and 20 foreign tourists are selected as participants of the investigation. Quantitative study method is employed in order to investigate and discuss the current situation of tourism-English majors'intercultural communicative competence. Conclusions have been drawn that 1) the tourism-English majors in vocational colleges are commonly very poor in intercultural communicative competence; 2) the students who participate in the investigation lack pragmatic knowledge and cultural knowledge and know little about cultural differences between Chinese and western cultures; 3) most of students thought that enough attention is not paid to cultural teaching by teachers and colleges; 4) the satisfactory degree of foreign tourists on English tour guide is not high and the most dissatisfactory item is language ability, next are interactive communication competence and awareness of cultural differences. Based on the research and the author's teaching experience, some constructive suggestions on how to develop the students'intercultural communicative competence have been given in the thesis, which aims to help students to develop their intercultural communicative competence and make them successful in future intercultural communication.