A Study On College Students’ Intercultural Sensitivity

In different cultures people think and behave in different ways, so being a successful communicator becomes more significant in human’s living skills. Intercultural competence is a concept to describe people’s skill in exchanging ideas with people from other cultures. Individuals with higher intercultural competence are capable of finishing the exchange of information successfully, and have the ability to negotiate when confronting information gaps and they choose to act initiatively to overcome misunderstandings. The concept of intercultural competence includes cognitive level, behavioral level and affective level. Intercultural sensitivity belongs to the affective level, and it refers to communication participants who behave actively to stimulate themselves to comprehend, accept and enjoy culture differences. Intercultural sensitivity plays a significant role in intercultural communications and makes exchanging interactions of cultural information more effectively. A successful intercultural interaction starts from sensitivity towards the differences among world cultures.As an effective part of intercultural communication competence, Intercultural Sensitivity has received attention gradually by researchers home and abroad. Domestically the empirical studies about intercultural sensitivity are short in quantity, and studies about the way which college students come into contact with foreign culture has just started. This study uses both quantitative and qualitative method to analyze samples’total condition and the correlations of the five items firstly, and then analyses the data in order to put forward some teaching suggestions in order to provide reference for researchers and English teachers.This study investigates260non-English major undergraduates form Northwest A&F University. The results indicate that undergraduates’ intercultural sensitivity is high in general. The average data shows that the highest level of all the participants are Respect for Cultural Difference and Interaction Engagement, and secondly is the Interaction Enjoyment, thirdly the Interaction Attentiveness, and the lowest is the Interaction Confidence. The max value and the minimal value show that the internal diversity of the Interaction Confidence and the Interaction Enjoyment are much greater than the other three items. In gender difference analysis, female students’average level of Respect for Cultural Difference, Interaction Engagement, Interaction Enjoyment and Interaction Confidence are all higher than male students’level except for Interaction Attentiveness. Among the five factors, Respect for Cultural Difference and Interaction Engagement is considered the highest level of all the participants, and the lowest is the Interaction Confidence. All the correlations are significantly positive related and the strongest correlation between the five factors is Interaction Confidence and Interaction Enjoyment. It can be drawn from the data of this case study that five factors of intercultural sensitivity involve deeply in students language study and cross-cultural communication.