An Investigation On Intercultural Communication Competence Of English Major Freshmen

With the rapid development of the modern society, intercultural communication is becoming more and more frequent. As the most crucial part of intercultural communication, research on intercultural communication competence has become a very important project for more and more scholars. Besides, intercultural communication competence is playing a more and more important role in foreign language teaching, especially for English majors. For English majors, how to improve intercultural communication competence has become quite a problem in their study.Foreign and domestic scholars have done a lot on intercultural communication and intercultural communication competence. However, relatively few domestic studies have been found. Among these studies, freshmen of the English majors are seldom taken as researching subject.This study combines qualitative research and quantitative research by using questionnaire and interview as the research instruments. It tries to explore the current intercultural communication competence level of English major freshmen and the correlation between English major freshmen’s language proficiency and their intercultural communication competence. Accordingly, some advice is given to improve their ICC. Results of this study shows that:1. Generally speaking, the English major freshmen’s ICC is at an upper middle level. Furthermore, they behave best in intercultural sensitivity but worst in intercultural effectiveness.2. English major freshmen’s language proficiency is not closely correlated with their ICC Their language proficiency shows low correlation with all the three factors of ICC. No correlation has been found between their language proficiency and some specific ICC factors.The author gives some advice to improve English major freshmen’s ICC based on the findings above. Besides, the limitations of this research are discussed.