Designing An Intercultural Training Program For Foreign-related Tour Guides Of Huangshan Scenic Spot

Scattered previous research home and abroad has been done to provide tour guideswith various trainings in relation to intercultural competence. However, those trainingprograms or courses are often too vague and general. The research in this thesis aims tofocus on both the general theoretical framework of intercultural competence training andthe concrete practical skills targeted at a qualified foreign-related tour guide. The three-daytraining has been intensive with both didactic and experiential methods, in order to leavethose trainees the unity of knowing and doing.This thesis has mainly focused on the design of the intercultural training program forthose foreign-related tour guides of Huangshan scenic spot. And the procedure of thedesign includes need assessment, training objectives, training content, training methods,sequencing arrangement and also debriefing section. In order to ensure the objectivity ofthe research and to make the findings more persuasive, the author has tried to measure theICC (intercultural communication competence) of those guides by means of BASICinstrument with eight factors before and after the three-day training. Through thecomparison of the different results between the pre-training and the post-trainingquantitative measurements, the author has proved that the intercultural training itself iseffective with the improvement of the tour guides’ intercultural communicationcompetence. Meanwhile the post-training interview as a qualitative evaluation has alsobeen conducted to make the result more convincing.Limitations exist inevitably due to the deviation in statistical analysis of thequestionnaires and also the participants’ subjective interference in the interviews.Therefore, further studies may keep adopting the combination of both the quantitativemethods and the qualitative methods and try to integrate them, so that both the comingresults and the dynamic process can be emphasized.