Intercultural Sensitivity And Its Correlation With Home Culture Awareness:A Study On Overseas Chinese Students In Britain

Along with the development of world globalization,more and more communication in all fields between countries comes into being,and learning science and technology from developed countries becomes an effective way to develop our country.With more and more Chinese students studying in foreign countries,it is important for them to master cross-cultural communication skills in their study and social life.Therefore,global cultural awareness,intercultural sensitivity and home cultural awareness are necessary qualities for being truly intercultural in this globalized world.Intercultural sensitivity and home culture awareness are determining elements of an individual's intercultural communication competence,and they are,in many ways,closely related.However,scarce attention has been paid to home culture awareness in previous literature,though intercultural sensitivity has been much studied.Following earlier literature,in this study,intercultural sensitivity is defined as the ability to develop a positive emotion towards understanding and appreciating cultural differences that promotes an appropriate and effective behavior in intercultural communication;on the other hand,home cultural awareness refers to cognition to our own culture and cultural principles from intercultural communication.The participants of this study are 51 Chinese overseas students in the UK.These are students who have direct contact with other cultures,and who are also messengers of Chinese culture.This study intends to find out the status quo of their intercultural sensitivity,their home cultural awareness,as well as the correlation between the two.Questionnaires modified from Intercultural Sensitivity Scale(Chen and Starosta,2009)and Home cultural awareness questionnaire(Chen,1998)are used as the main research instruments.To gather in-depth information from the participants,4semi-structured interviews were also conducted,each lasting for at least 30 minutes.The findings of this study are as the following:(1)Research objects' intercultural sensitivity was in an upper level(73 out of100),participants' intercultural sensitivity has been improved following Bennett's DMIS model during their sojourn life in UK.(2)Comparing to participant students' level of intercultural sensitivity,their level of home cultural awareness was much lower(68 out of 100),and its improvement was relatively weaker(according to qualitative results).(3)Participant students' home cultural awareness has an obvious positive correlation with their intercultural sensitivity(Pearson's correlation coefficient is 0.574);all factors of ICS keeps a positive close relationship with home cultural awareness(>= 0.4)(4)Participants' all aspects are improved during their sojourn life in UK;their experience of studying abroad not only helped them to improve their intercultural sensitivity but also enhanced their awareness of their home culture.In spite of the effort made,there are some limitations in this paper.Therefore,it is suggested to cover a larger population for questionnaire and also break an interview into several pieces at particular time points in future researches.