An Empirical Study Of The Relationship Between Intercultural Communicative Competence(ICC) And IELTS Score

With the faster growth of globalization, communication between countries and cultures becomes a common phenomenon. And exchange of culture is an indispensable part of it. Therefore, intercultural communication plays an important role in modern society. In foreign language teaching, intercultural communicative competence receives more and more concern, and to improve intercultural communicative competence becomes one of the goals of foreign language teaching. However, in daily foreign language teaching, most of attention goes to improving linguistic competence. And it has been taken for granted that the improvement of linguistic competence can help the improvement of intercultural communicative competence. But there is no evidence to prove that. Thus, this paper tries to discuss the following three questions by empirical research: 1) What is the relationship like between intercultural communicative competence(ICC) and linguistic competence(IELTS score) of the students who are about to go abroad to study? 2) What are the weak points in these students? intercultural communicative competence? And 3) What are some suggestions in intercultural communicative competence training for those who are about to go abroad to study?In order to figure out the relationship between intercultural communicative competence and linguistic competence, 60 students who are about to go abroad to study are chosen as the subjects of the paper. And their IELTS scores are used to represent their linguistic competence. Based on the theories of intercultural communicative competence, an empirical research is applied in the study. And a questionnaire which is designed based on the intercultural communicative competence models of Byram and Wen Qiufang has been given to these subjects to collect data. The questionnaire has been applied to Chinese students and proved to have high reliability and validity.By using the software SPSS 13.0 to analyze, the results of the study have been clear: 1) There is no significant relationship between ICC and linguistic competence(IELTS score). 2) Students who are about to go abroad to study are weak in linguistic competence, discourse competence and intercultural knowledge among the eight factors in ICC. 3) The suggestions of improving the intercultural communicative competence are given in three steps. First of all, it is important to improve the awareness and motivation of intercultural communication of the students, and then it is necessary to try to improve their intercultural knowledge and skills. Therefore, the aim of improving intercultural communicative competence can be achieved.Finally, the limitations of the study and suggestions for further study have been put forward.