A Study Of The Research From Home And Abroad On "Intercultural Competence" And "Intercultural Communication Competence" (2001-2010)

Chinese and foreign researchers hold different opinions on intercultural competence and intercultural communication competence, which are two popular subjects in the studies of intercultural communication. The difference has raised the researcher's interest to conduct this research in order to provide an overview of the research situations of the Chinese and foreign studies on intercultural competence and intercultural communication competence.This research has collected papers published or written by Chinese and foreign researchers from 2001 to 2010 from seven databases, four Chinese key journals on foreign languages studies and three international key journals on intercultural communication studies and analyzed the data in three aspects, which are research quantity, research content and research method. Research content was divided into three aspects to be further analyzed. They are categorization of research content, research subject and research suggestions. It is a review of literatures on intercultural competence and intercultural communication competence. Based on the results and discussion, suggestions were drawn for future studies on intercultural competence and intercultural communication competence and for the development of intercultural education.According to the research, the following results were found. Chinese have conducted much more researches on intercultural communication competence than foreign researchers while foreign researchers were more interested in studying intercultural competence. The research content of the papers collected can be divided into subject, measure, concept and application. Chinese and foreign researchers were most passionate in conducting the researches of measure. In the research subject, it is found that Chinese researchers focus on studying the groups of language learners, non-language major students, teachers, managers and people with other identities. Besides these five groups of subjects, foreign researchers were interested in the other two groups of subjects, which were international students and expatriates. Among the groups of research subjects, Researches on non-language major students consisted of the biggest percentage of Chinese and foreign researches. This research also provides suggestions for further studies and development of intercultural education according to the data analysis of the suggestions offered by the researches collected. It is found that foreign researchers preferred to offer suggestions for further studies while Chinese researchers inclined to give suggestions on the development of intercultural education.