An Investigation On Intercultural Communication Competence Of Non-english Major Seniors At Business School

Globalization and technological advance enable people from different cultural backgrounds meet each other more frequently; thus intercultural communication is becoming more and more common in people’s daily life.Senior students are about to graduate from universities and begin to work in different industries. It is difficult to find a job if one does not possess any intercultural communication ability nowadays. English majors have their advantages in intercultural communication because the relevant courses they studied, while non-English majors can also acquire intercultural communication skills in other ways. This thesis aims to figure out the current situation of ICC of non-English seniors and try to give some feasible advice on foreign language teaching in universities.The questionnaire survey is conducted among 70 non-English seniors in Business School of Xi’an International Studies University which investigates their current situation of ICC. The SPSS 20.0 was employed to fulfill the statistic work. The research results show that the current status of their ICC is not qualified enough for a successful intercultural communication; and there exists correlation between ICC and all the seven competences, especially the social knowledge competence and strategic competence. The linguistic competence is also relevant, but not quite significant as we thought. This suggests that the students still can enhance their ICC through language acquisition in class but at the same time, they also need to possess more social knowledge of target culture and learn more communicating strategies. Under such circumstance, foreign language teaching should put more emphasis on students’ actual strategic knowledge, cultural knowledge and their language ability as well.