The Correlation Between Language Learning Motivation And Intercultural Communicative Competence

The ultimate goal of learning a second language is using them to communicate and interact with people in different fields like economy,culture and politics.The successful learning of a second language involves many factors including excellent teachers,good language learning atmosphere and diverse teaching methods involving multi-media.Besides the above factors,individual factors,especially affective factors,play an important role in language achievement,thus have attracted more and more attention from researchers.It has been pointed out in some researches that language learning motivation,as an important part of the affective factor,influences the intercultural communicative competence greatly.Nevertheless,few empirical studies tried to examine the correlation between language learning motivation and intercultural communicative competence,especially among Chinese students who study in American language schools,thus the originality of this research is to take Chinese students who studied in the University of Central Oklahoma as the participants and seeks to find whether there is a correlation between intercultural communicative competence and language learning motivation,as well as between intercultural communicative competence and four subcategories of motivation: integrative orientation,instrumental orientation,attitudes and beliefs,and parental encouragement.This research is based on Gardner's socio-education modal and Arasaratnam's intercultural communicative competence model.Two questionnaires and a quiz were used.One of the questionnaires is Arasaratnam's 15-item instrument which was used to measure participants' intercultural communicative competence.The other one is the modified version of Attitude Motivation Test Battery(AMTB)designed by Semman and Yamazaki to measure participants' language learning motivation.The quiz is adapted from linguistic He Ziran's English Pragmatic Competence Quiz.Questionnaires and the quiz were handed out to 100 students from English Language School of University of Central Oklahoma through emails and in class.Then SPSS 21.20 was used to analyze the data collected from the questionnaires and the quiz.Spearson rank-order correlation test was used to test the correlation between intercultural communicative competence and language learning motivation,as well as between intercultural communicative competence and the four subcategories of language learning motivation.The statistics shows that:(1)The average intercultural communicative competence and the average language learning motivation of these subjects are of a medium level.Moreover,the levels of these two factors are polarized.However,a huge amount of the subjects has quite strong language learning motivation and intercultural communicative competence.The reason of this contradiction is that some of the subjects' language learning motivation and intercultural communicative competence are of a really low level.(2)There is a significant positive correlation between intercultural communicative competence and language learning motivation.What's more,significant positive correlations also exist between intercultural communicative competence and four subcategories of motivation.These findings show that language learning motivation and its four subcategories exert great influence on intercultural communicative competence.According to the above results,some suggestions can be provided:(1)Language instructors should figure out some ways to make learners have positive attitudes towards the native speakers of the target language as well as towards the target language community.For example,native speakers can be invited to take part in the classroom activities.(2)Classroom activities and tasks need to be realistic and meet students' needs.(3)Diverse interesting activities can be employed to arouse students' interest in the target language and the target language classroom.(4)Teachers should communicate with students' parents actively,which can make parents pay more attention to students' language learning.