An Investigation Into Students' Intercultural Communicative Competence In A Chinese Senior High School

In recent decades,there are more and more cultural exchanges between China and the other countries around the world.As a matter of fact,cross-cultural communication has become quite common in our daily life.To cater for the rapid social and economic development,China needs more people who have a high level of communication competence in cross-cultural communications.Therefore,it is exceedingly crucial for English teachers to cultivate their students' intercultural communication competence and help their students learn to interact appropriately and effectively with people from different cultural backgrounds.This research was conducted to investigate the current situation of senior high school students' intercultural communicative competence.The subjects in this study were 237 senior middle school students in Hukou Middle School.It aimed to explore the actual situation of intercultural communicative competence in a Chinese senior high school and examine whether there were any differences in intercultural communicative competence between the high proficiency and low proficiency students.Meanwhile,it also investigated whether there were any differences in intercultural communicative competence between the male and female students.Both the quantitative and qualitative approaches were employed to explore the senior high school students' intercultural communicative competence.In the quantitative study,a socio-cultural test designed by Wang Zhenya(1990)was distributed to the subjects.Some questions in the test were revised in order to make it more suitable for the senior middle school students.In the qualitative study,8 English teachers and 8students were interviewed respectively.The data collected was analyzed by using SPSS 17.0.The findings of the study display that:(1)the senior high school students' intercultural communicative competence is relatively weak,and the majority of the subjects got scores ranging from 140 to 160,with the average mean score of the test being 144.3.The results also show that the students do a better job in non-verbal communication than verbal communication and cultural knowledge.Additionally,the paired sample t-test indicates there is a significant difference between students' small and big “C” cultural knowledge.(2)As for the relationship between English proficiency and intercultural communicative competence,there exit some significant differences between high and low English proficiency students.The high English proficiency students showed greater interest in big “C” culture.As far as non-verbal and verbal communication,there is no significant difference between the two groups.(3)Finally,gender has certain effect on the students' intercultural communicative competence.There is a significant difference in verbal communication between the male and female students.In general,the female students performed much better than the male students in verbal-communication.However,as for non-verbal communication and cultural knowledge,there are no significant differences between the male and female students.Based on the findings summarized above,some implications for improving senior high school students' intercultural communicative competence could be offered.First,English teachers should not only lay emphasis on their English efficiency,but also focus on cultivating students' intercultural communicative competence.Next,English teachers should raise their own cultural awareness and adopt effective methods to improve their students' cultural knowledge.In addition,English teachers should organize various activities to enhance their students' cultural and communicative competence.Finally,teachers should make efforts to create an authentic environment to cultivate their students' intercultural awareness.