A Study On Intercultural Competence Testing For Non-English Majors

Culture instruction is an inextricable part of intercultural foreign language teaching, while culture testing has long been a major obstacle in culture instruction. Most regular language tests employed currently by Chinese colleges merely concentrate on the assessment of listening speaking, reading and writing and ignore assessing whether or not students have actually acquired the intercultural competence. The noticeable defects in culture testing research and practice are lack of concrete instructional objectives and difficulties in test design and administration which is due to the subjectivity and complexity of culture. Bearing these in mind, the thesis aims to work out a feasible and theoretical framework of culture testing for non-English majors.Based on the relevant theory survey, a set of fundamental cultural learning objectives is put forward. The model of ICC presented by Byram (1997) is adopted as the theoretical basis for proposing a tentative culture testing model, in which the testing of culture includes the assessment of cultural knowledge, cultural understanding and cultural behavior. To get more valid and reliable evidence for the culture test, an empirical study is conducted which details the study form the description of the research rationale, research instruments, research subjects, and research methods to the research findings. A series of statistical analyses such as correlation, item difficulty, internal consistency, and collection of discriminant evidence are employed to validate the culture test. On the basis of the empirical research, the culture test proves to be a theoretically sound and practically feasible measurement system for assessing students'intercultural communicative competence.The present research is more of a question raising than of a solution providing attempt to the issue. It is to be hoped that the feasibility of culture testing proved by the research can provide language instructors with feedback on whether their learners have benefited from their intercultural teaching and that this study will help bring some of the best ideas to the attention of testing practitioners as to how to evaluate intercultural communicative competence.