An Empirical Study On Engineering College Students’ Intercultural Willingness-to-communicate

This study is an empirical research on Chinese engineering collegestudents’ intercultural willingness-to-communicate (IWTC), aimed atinvestigating the status quo of subjects’ IWTC. This research was basedon four questions.1. To what extent are the subjects ready or unready tointeract under the intercultural context?2. How do IWTC, interculturalcommunicative apprehension (ICA), self-perceived foreign languagecompetence (SPLC), and international posture (IP) correlate?3. To whatextent do these above-mentioned variables predict IWTC?4. Which arethe major factors affecting the subjects’ IWTC, ICA, and IP?This research surveyed176undergraduate engineering collegestudents by adopting a previously designed IWTC scale and finallyanalysing the data through SPSS18.0. The key findings are that thesubjects manifested a relatively low willingness level in the interculturalinteraction, and that ICA showed a negative correlation with IWTC, while,IWTC was positively related to IP and SPLC.This study offers first-hand information on the status quo ofengineering college students’ IWTC in China, which is referential inscheduling intercultural education curriculum.