Taking Chinese-American Literature As A Teaching Tool To Improve The Intercultural Sensitivity Of Freshmen College Students

With many great international events having been held in China, such as the2008Beijing Olympics and2010World Expo, more and more Chinese people haveopportunities to communicate with people from other countries, especially universitystudents. A large number of universities students have participated in theseinternational events, either as volunteers or working staff. With a view to improve theintercultural sensitivity of college students, the author has designed a two-day trainingprogram for college freshmen.Given that the trainees have little or no intercultural communication experiences, theauthor has taken Chinese-American literature as the training sources. Because nomatter what their major is, they all attend English course and English literary worksare the required textbooks for college students. Compared with other trainingmaterials, literary works are more interesting and relatively easy to understand. Theother reason for adopting Chinese-American literary works for training is that most ofthe intercultural conflicts presented in these works are mother-daughter conflicts, so itis comparatively easy for these trainees to understand and it is more effective toimprove their intercultural sensitivity. In this thesis, the author employs ChenGuo-ming and William J. Starosta’s Intercultural Sensitivity Scale (ISS). The authorhas also designed a questionnaire concerning their intercultural experiences andwillingness to participate in the training. Before the training,80students completedthe ISS and40of them have participated in the training. The80participants have allfinished their Gaokao examinations and they would start their college life inSeptember,2012. And after the training, trainees did the ISS again. The thesis authoranalyzed the test results between the control group and experimental group, and alsocompared trainees’ pre-test and post-test results to examine whether this trainingprogram is effective to improve Chinese university students’ intercultural sensitivity. This thesis aimed to answer several questions, including the level of interculturalsensitivity of college students, especially the freshmen, whether they are at high-levelof intercultural sensitivity or low-level. The thesis author also wanted to explore thepossibility of taking the Chinese-American literature as the training material andtesting the effectiveness of the training program that took the Chinese-Americanliterature as the training program. The test results showed that before the training, the80participants had low scores of the items of ISS, except the respect for culturaldifferences. The participants stated that it was relatively easier for them to showrespect for other culture. After the training, scores for each item after training hadbeen increased. Interaction confidence, interaction enjoyment and interactionattentiveness had witnessed great increase in their mean score. And the scores forinteraction engagement and respect for cultural differences have also been increasedalthough on a small scale.