A Relative Study On English Majors’Intercultural Sensitivity And Culture Acquisition Of Target Language

With culture teaching being the hot issue of foreign language teaching, various approaches have been proposed, such as goal-specific, pattern-specific, content-specific orientations. Despite of numerous researches about culture teaching, studies on target culture acquisition or test is far from satisfactory. Intercultural sensitivity, an important perspective of intercultural communicative competence, is regarded as a vital criterion for one’s understanding and tolerance of cultural differences, which inevitably exerts certain effect on target culture acquisition. This thesis attempts to explore the issue from the intercultural-communication-specific perspective, with the aims to elaborate the real situation of English majors’ intercultural sensitivity and target culture acquisition and to discuss the correlation between the above two factors.This thesis adopts three main instruments:an intercultural sensitivity scale, a target culture test and SPSS16.0.56English-major juniors from Nanjing University of Science and Technology are taken as the subjects of present research. Generally speaking, the research consists of three major procedures:first of all, the intercultural sensitivity of the subjects was measured with the application of Intercultural Sensitivity Scale by Guo-Ming Chen&William J. Starosta (2000); then, a35-minute test was conducted to check the subjects’ target culture acquisition, which mainly comes from the Socio-cultural Test designed by Wang Zhenya (1990,2005). Finally, SPSS16.0was applied to conduct the concerned analyses about the above two factors, namely, the descriptive analysis of intercultural sensitivity, the descriptive analysis of target culture acquisition and the correlation analysis between the above two factors.The results demonstrate that:1) the general level of intercultural sensitivity is medium, which means that most of the subjects have gone beyond the uncertain level and been close to the agreement level. However, only about7percent of the subjects have a high level of intercultural sensitivity. Among the five factors, the subjects have the best performance on Respect for Cultural Difference and Interaction Enjoyment and moderate performance on Interaction Attentiveness and Interaction Engagement while Interaction Confidence is the weakest part of the subjects.2) Similarly, the subjects’target culture acquisition also lies at the medium level, with the number of students getting score over80taking one fourth of the number of the students getting score less than60. In addition, the subjects’acquisition of target culture develops in an unbalanced way with verbal communicative competence a bit stronger than the nonverbal communicative competence and general culture competence surpassing formal culture competence.3) Intercultural sensitivity is positively correlated with the target culture acquisition. Among the five factors of intercultural sensitivity,the correlation between Interaction Attentiveness and Socio-cultural Test is the most significant.Based on the previous research findings, the author puts forward some suggestions about the development of intercultural sensitivity and the culture teaching. The innovation of this thesis mainly lies in two aspects:discussing target culture acquisition from the intercultural perspective and demonstrating the relationship between intercultural sensitivity and target culture acquisition. All of these findings are tentative discussion, which is hoped to be of help to culture teaching and development of intercultural communication competence.