A Study On The Effectiveness Of Using Skype To Improve The Intercultural Communication Competence Of Chinese College Non-English Majors

With the development of globalization, the communication among countries becomes more and more frequent. Intercultural communication has become the integral part of people's work and life. However the current domestic training of intercultural communication competence is mostly confined to the impartment of cultural knowledge in books. And the learner always can not put what they have learned into the practice in real communication. Lacking of real language context and communicating partner in China is the main cause. With the fast development of internet technology, a variety of sound communicating tools crop up one after another, which provides us with the opportunity and possibility to overcome the problem of lacking in communicating partners.On basis of the theory of computer-mediated communication (CMC), choosing 40 students possessing computers from 5 classes in the English Summer Camp of Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2005 as the sample, the author tries to verify the validity of non-English major students'using software Skype to improve their intercultural communication competence by means of survey and interview in the course of six months. This experiment mainly verify the four aspects of intercultural communication competence (ICC) raised by the famous scholar Jiayuxin, i.e. the basic communication competence system, the affective and relational competence system, the episodic competence system and the strategy competence system. Specifically, the study addresses the following questions:(1) Is there any discrepancy between the students'intercultural knowledge and their intercultural communication competence in the real communication? If yes, is it necessary to enhance their ICC in the real communication?(2) By means of comparing students'communicating performance before using the Skype with students'communicating performance after using it, can we make sure that their ICC will be improved? If yes, which aspects of their ICC have been dramatically improved and which aspects still need to be further strengthened?(3) What strategies should the students employ using the Skype to communicate with foreigners?The thesis employs a combined method of quantitative study and qualitative study. Questionnaires have been designed to test the participants'ICC before and after the training program. The data collected by the questionnaires were analyzed with SPSS to compare their performance in different phases. Meanwhile, the author's interview with the participants'performance during the program and the interview with them afterwards contribute to examining the appropriateness of the approach as well.The present study shows that using Skype is indeed effective in improving the participants'intercultural communication competence. However, it still has disadvantages. It just tries to create a simulation communication context which is far from the real face-to-face communication. In particular, non-verbal communication is seldom discussed in the research. Therefore, it is necessary to probe into the phenomenon of using net language symbols to substitute body language. Thus the effectiveness of using chatting tools to improve intercultural communication competence can be strengthened.