An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Content-based Instruction On College Students' Intercultural Communication Competence

As the world has become a global village,intercultural communication is inevitable.Thus,how to master English and develop intercultural communication competence(ICC)draws a lot of scholarly attention.However,it is not enough to communicate with foreigners effectively and appropriately without sound intercultural communication competence(ICC).For the past decades,scholars abroad mainly focused on ICC models and theories,and barely did empirical studies,while the scholars in China mainly focused on students' ICC itself but cared little about their English proficiency.On the other hand,Content-based Instruction(CBI)has been studied a lot in English teaching,but scholars of CBI mostly paid attention to ESP or learning motivation.What's more,the empirical studies of combining CBI and ICC together with students' English proficiency considered are still rare.This thesis investigates how Content-based Instruction(CBI)enhances college students' ICC through both qualitative and quantitative methods.It attempts to answer the following four questions:(1)Is CBI effective in improving students' ICC?(2)Is CBI effective in improving students' English proficiency?(3)What is the correlation between one's English proficiency and his/her ICC?(4)In what areas do the significant changes of students' ICC take place?In order to answer these questions,this thesis adopts Cheng & Starosta's ISS and Chen & Portalla's IES,Zhong Hua's ICCSRS and CET4 as the instruments to do assessment.All of the three scales have the whole internal reliability reaching 0.810.CET4 also has been well tested and proved to be highly reliable and valid.91 sophomores from two classes which are randomly selected from Shanghai Civil Aviation College(SCAC)joined the research.Class 1 is the experimental class which has 42 students and class 2 is the control class which has 49 students.The Scales and CET4 paper are sent to all of them twice to get the quantitative data.The first time is at the start of this semester on September 25,2018.The second time is after the one-semester CBI teaching in college English on January 10,2019.As to thequalitative data,they come from the open-ended interviews with 6 students at all ICC levels from the experimental class.The thesis utilizes SPSS 19.0 to process these data for comparing the changes and differences.The correlation analysis is also implemented to test the relationship between ICC and students' English proficiency.The thesis makes the following findings:(1)CBI teaching approach is effective in developing college students' ICC;(2)CBI teaching approach is effective in improving students' English proficiency;(3)English proficiency has a highly positive correlation with a person's ICC and the higher one's English proficiency level is,the better his/her ICC will be;(4)CBI teaching approach has effectively improved students' intercultural attitudes,discourse competence,sociolinguistic competence and intercultural awareness.