A Study Of The Effectiveness Of Experiential Approach In Raising Intercultural Awareness Of Chinese College Students

In the current world, more and more people have the chance to communicate directly with others from different cultures. Because of the insufficient knowledge of cultures and some other psychological factors, misunderstanding and even conflict arise constantly. Intercultural training (ICT) is doubtlessly an effective way to avoid such incidents by improving people's intercultural communication competence. In the last decades, foreign scholars and practitioners have set up a sound academic system of ICT, which includes the goals, contents and approaches of the training. Among the various approaches, experiential approach has become the most popular with the declared advantages. For one reason or another, ICT has not received systematic study in China. The social demand of it makes it urgent to introduce the foreign researchers'achievement. However, it cannot be merely borrowed and adopted in our country, which has vastly different social conditions. To examine if the most popular training method, experiential approach, effective for the Chinese college students, ---who are the future of the country, ---the author of this thesis has launched an experimental training program among a group of college sophomores. The common training techniques, i.e. simulation game, critical incidents, case study, role play, have been adopted. The activities in the program are borrowed or designed with existing activities as reference. The thesis employs a combined method of quantitative study and qualitative study. Questionnaires have been designed to test the participants'intercultural awareness before and after the training program. The data collected by the questionnaires were analyzed with SPSS to compare their performance in the different time. Meanwhile, the author's observation on the participants'performance during the training and the interview with them afterwards contribute to examining the appropriateness of the approach as well. The present study shows that experiential approach is indeed effective in improving the participants'intercultural awareness. However, not all the techniques are equally welcomed by them. In particular, the simulation game is unexpectedly complained by a lot of them. As the characteristics of this approach, the trainer's task is to guide, encourage and stimulate trainees to think and generalize independently instead of telling them the "answer". Nevertheless, the trainees'performance revealed that the approach is not a perfect one for them. If to be adopted in China, experiential approach needs to be modified and improved.