A Comparative Study Of Intercultural Awareness And Intercultural Communicative Competence Between Liberal Arts Students And Science Students

With the development of linguistic theory and the ever-increasing requirement of intercultural communication, intercultural communicative competence and intercultural awareness become one of the ultimate goals of foreign language teaching, as its practice by foreign language learners can reflect the degree of the success or failure of foreign language education. A lot of experts have undertaken researches and published related works and articles in this field. Plenty of studies, conducted both in theory and in practice, focus on the outcomes or the realization of intercultural communication so that more importance has been attached to studying people living in different cultures such as immigrants. However, among these works and articles, very few are concerned with the comparative situation of intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence between Liberal Arts students and Science students in senior high school.In the light of the above, this thesis attempts to investigate the comparative situation of intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence between Liberal Arts students and Science students using the results of test and questionnaire among two Liberal Arts classes and two Science classes, to find out the difference between the two kinds of students, and to further examine the correlation among students'intercultural awareness, their intercultural communicative competence and language proficiency, and offers some pedagogical suggestions on the teaching and learning of intercultural communication in Chinese EFL context.The significance of the study is that it provides a new perspective for intercultural research on Chinese high school students. The study shows that there is indeed some difference between Liberal Arts students and Science students on intercultural communicative competence and intercultural awareness. Liberal Arts students perform better than Science students on intercultural communicative competence, and the former is more sensitive to different culture than the latter. It is also demonstrated that Intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence has close relationship. But students'language proficiency does not necessarily relate to their intercultural awareness or intercultural communicative competence.