A Study Of Cultural Empathy Competence Obtained By Chinese Postgraduates

It is widely acknowledged that intercultural communication has become a common phenomenon in such a multicultural world. However, cultural difference can threaten the successful conducting of intercultural communication to a great extent. To overcome cultural conflicts and achieve communication goals, it is necessary to improve the cultural empathy competence. Cultural empathy refers to a process in which the two parties purposefully shift their cultural positions and consciously get rid of the original cultural constraints and then put them in another cultural pattern to feel and comprehend the other cultural traditions.A large number of scholars abroad have conducted both theoretical and empirical researches on cultural empathy, including training the cultural empathy competence of people who work overseas, analyzing the empathic performance of children and so on. Whereas at home, studies on cultural empathy are mainly aimed at utilizing the quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the cultural empathy competence obtained by Chinese undergraduates. However, few articles have conducted investigations of the cultural empathy competence of Chinese postgraduates. Therefore, this thesis will focus on the cultural empathy situation of Chinese postgraduates, the relationship between cognitive empathy competence and communicative empathy competence and the factors connected with cultural empathy competence, thereby providing some useful and effective advice for Chinese postgraduates to cultivate their cultural empathy competence.To achieve the research goal, the author makes great efforts to answer the following three specific questions.1) From the cognitive aspect and the communicative aspect, what is the level of the cultural empathy competence obtained by Chinese postgraduates? 2) What is the relationship between cognitive empathy competence and communicative empathy competence of Chinese postgraduates? 3) What factors are correlated to the cultural empathy competence of Chinese postgraduates in intercultural communication?80 postgraduates from SEU-Monash Joint Graduate School were selected as the subjects of the investigation and the quantitative method was employed in the research. Firstly, a self-reported questionnaire was used to measure the cultural empathy competence of the subjects from the cognitive aspect and the communicative one. Then a language proficiency test was employed to test the English level of the subjects. After that, a socio-cultural knowledge test was utilized to evaluate the subjects’ knowledge of the western social culture. Lastly, an intercultural sensitivity scale was applied to assess the subjects’sensitivity to cultural difference. It should be noted that all the research on cultural empathy competence are specific to the English speaking countries’ cultures.After processing the data with normal distribution analysis, Spearman’s Correlation analysis and multi-regression analysis, this thesis generates three findings. 1) The cultural empathy competence of the investigated Chinese postgraduates is above the middle level (the mean value is around 74).2) The cognitive empathy is positively related to the communicative one (r=0.87, p<0.01).3) The English proficiency level (t=3.09, p<0.01), the knowledge of social culture (t=3.22, p<0.01) and the intercultural sensitivity (t=8.92, p<0.01) are factors correlated to the cultural empathy competence of Chinese postgraduates. Therefore, the author proposes some detailed suggestions aiming at improving the cultural empathy competence of Chinese postgraduates from the three aspects. For example, to raise the language proficiency level, teachers can invite foreign scholars to hold English lectures or academic exchanges and students can study by themselves through the network like watching American series. As regards increasing socio-cultural knowledge, teachers can organize some extracurricular activities such as English corner for students to get access to different cultures. When it comes to enhancing intercultural sensitivity, great efforts can be made to overcome stereotypes and ethnocentrism.