A Study Of Intercultural Nonverbal Communicative Competence Of Business English Majors

As is known, China is more and more open politically, economically and culturally. With the influence of globalization, especially the economical globalization, China cannot avoid frequent contact and communication with the western world, especially English–speaking countries. The concept of intercultural communication is being given more attention especially in business interactions. For business people, it is very important to acquire the intercultural communicative competence in order to communicate with people from different cultures smoothly, appropriately and effectively.Business English is a tool for business people to establish business relationship. Business English majors may be likely to become business persons who are proficient with the language tool. So for them, it is more important to develop intercultural competence. But as for intercultural competence, intercultural nonverbal communicative competence is a component at least as important as verbal communicative competence, for nonverbal communication comprises a bigger part of the whole communication. For Business English majors, who have more opportunities to use English to communicate with business people in their future career, it is more important to develop and improve intercultural nonverbal communicative competence.Since intercultural competence, especially nonverbal communicative competence is so important; the author wants to study Business English majors'nonverbal communicative competence under the traditional English teaching circumstances and to learn about their intercultural communicative competence accordingly: whether their communicative competence is given enough attention and whether there are relevant contents in English classes to improve the students'intercultural communicative competence especially their nonverbal communicative competence. With the questions alike, the author conducts the study through such instruments as a culture test, a questionnaire and interviews,trying to find out certain problems and the causes. As a result, the author finds out that under the influence of the traditional teaching mode, there is obvious inconsistency between Business English majors'language proficiency and their intercultural nonverbal communicative competence; there are no special contents provided for the specialty of Business English and the teaching materials in class are not enough to improve the students'intercultural communicative competence, especially their nonverbal communicative competence. Generally, the intercultural nonverbal communicative competence is not satisfactory mainly because of certain problems in Business English class, from teachers, teaching materials to students themselves, to which the author also put forward some feasible solutions.