A Study Of The Intercultural Communicative Competence Of Hainan English Tour Guides

Based on the Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC for short) theory of Belay, this study investigates Hainan English tour guides’intercultural communicative competence, trying to find out the problems in their intercultural communication and provide suggestions for improvement.Tourism has become an important industry undergoing rapid growth on a global scale. Tour guides, as the "soul of tourism", play an important role in tourism. The development and construction of "Hainan International Tourism Island" requires tour guides to have high intercultural communicative competence to serve the foreign visitors. Cultural differences can easily cause some misunderstandings when tour guides communicate with foreign tourists. Therefore, the study is of great practical significance.Data were mainly collected by using two sets of questionnaires, one for English tour guides and the other for tourists.150questionnaires were distributed through e-mail and hand-out,50to English tour guides and100to tourists.120valid questionnaires were collected,30from tour guides and90from tourists. The response rate was80%. With the help of SPSS19.0, the data were carefully processed and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Based on the analysis, the author finds that tour guides’ICC is relatively high except their listening ability. Foreign tourists are generally satisfied with the tour guides’ICC, except their understanding of cultural differences. Tour guides’gender partly influences their ICC; tour guides’ length of working partly influences their ICC; tour guides’English proficiency and education degree are not critical factors to their ICC; training partly influences their ICC; the gender of the tourists has no influence on their satisfaction.The innovations of this thesis are as follows:first, it is an empirical study of Hainan English tour guides’ICC, which is, in a sense, ground-breaking; second, the study provides some suggestions for improvement, which will facilitate the cultivation of English tour guides’ ICC.