Assessing Intercultural Competence In Foreign Language Education

With the deepening of globalization,educational institutions at home and abroad have attached great importance to intercultural competence as an important part of students' overall competence.Economic and cultural exchanges between China and other countries are becoming more and more frequent,and international talents with intercultural competence are urgently needed.Research shows that the field of foreign language education is the most active arena for the study of intercultural competence in China.The cultivation of intercultural competence has become a heated topic.However,the issue of intercultural competence assessment remains insufficiently developed,and relevant research is very limited.This lack of sufficient knowledge is an obstacle to the development of intercultural foreign language teaching.Assessment is an important part of the process of teaching and learning because it plays a key role in providing an empirical basis for tracking development,motivating learning,examining outcomes,and indicating areas for improvement.As foreign language education is developing and evolving,how to assess intercultural competence has become an urgent research topic.A systematic framework for the operationalization of assessment of intercultural competence in foreign language education remains to be developed,and assessment methods need to be diversified.Scholars of intercultural communication agree that intercultural competence is assessable,but it is a complicated process which demands a multi-dimensional and multi-method approach.The “SFLEP” Intercultural Competence Contest(the Contest for short)has done some pioneering work in this area.The Contest in nature is a process of assessment for intercultural competence in a target foreign language(English).The Contest,based on literature review and pedagogical practice,first conceptualizes intercultural competence in China's context by giving Chinese educational value to the three dimensions(cognitive understanding,affective attitude and behavioral skills)that are most widely recognized as dimensions which constitute intercultural competence.Then a series of assessment tasks are designed to externalize the internal competence and make the construct visible.The study has chosen three major tasks employed in the Contest as the subject of the research,namely “intercultural case development”,“scenario analysis” and“China story”.Assessment is a reasoning process based on evidence.Students' performance in completing those tasks is evidence of their intercultural competence,the characteristics of which go beyond accuracy and fluency of language and require further examination.These three tasks provide multi-channel access for students to demonstrate their intercultural competence in English.What kinds of evidence of intercultural competence are elicited by these three tasks? What are the differences between the performances of higher-ranking groups and lower ranking groups? In order to answer these research questions,data are collected and transcribed in one particular contest year in Shanghai,including “intercultural case development” in the semi-final stage(26 groups),“scenario analysis” in the final stage(10 groups),“China story” in the final stage(10 groups)with altogether around 460 minutes of audio recording.Then the performance is coded based on the judging criteria provided by the Contest so as to validate the three tasks as feasible in assessing intercultural competence.The criteria include three dimensions: content,effectiveness and presentation.Three fundamental modes of language function in communication(interpersonal,interpretive and presentational)are elicited in the three tasks4 thus projecting different levels of linguaculture learning.In “intercultural case development”,students' intercultural competence is reflected in the cases they have developed,presented and interpreted,that is,embodied in the width and depth of case content and case analysis.Findings show that groups of lower-ranking exhibit simplified understanding of intercultural issues,improper understanding and application of theoretical perspectives,and stereotypical views towards others and self.In “scenario analysis”,students' intercultural competence is assessed by how they understand and mediate intercultural conflicts in the intercultural video provided by the Contest.Groups with higher ranking can capture the essential intercultural points in the video prompt and exhibit more sophisticated understanding of the intercultural issues by applying theoretical perspectives.In addition,their presentation is better in terms of discourse management,language accuracy and appropriateness.“Intercultural case development” and “scenario analysis” are case/scenario-based,positioning students as analyzers/mediators in intercultural communication to assess their intercultural competence.The findings prove that theory-based perspectives applied by students can be assessed,and that these theories provide broad psychological principles to them as a way of understanding differences in human behavior across cultures.At the same time,they could restrain intercultural understanding if not properly understood and applied.“China story”,different from the previous two tasks,positions students as communicators/participants in intercultural communication to see whether they are able to tell China story in English to achieve discourse efficiency.Findings show that groups with a lower score have a superficial understanding of Chinese culture,that their choice of content fails to balance and integrate traditional and contemporary Chinese culture,and that they fail to take the cognitive level and affective needs of foreign publics into proper consideration.The study shows that these three tasks from the Contest are able to externalize students' intercultural competence and obtain direct evidence of different levels of intercultural competence when students are using a foreign language.As such,they can be employed as feasible assessment methods in foreign language education,suitable in particular to be employed in the more advanced level of intercultural communication course specified in the Guidelines on College English Teaching(2020).Problems and issues reflected in students' performance have pedagogical implications for intercultural foreign language education in China.Finally,the study proposes a framework for assessing intercultural competence in foreign language education within the view of learning-oriented assessment,which integrates language and intercultural competence in the assessment process and task design to externalize intercultural competence.The study examines the characteristics of contestants' performance in detail and provides the initial data for creating a more reliable and effective method to assess intercultural competence in the future.Due to the limitations of the contest-based data,more research is needed to explore the feasibility of these three tasks in a non-contest context so as to optimize task design and improve the assessment quality.