A Study Of Key Factors Of Chinese College Non-English Major Students' Intercultural Competence

As culture attracts more and more attention from scholars as well as business people in the process of globalization, intercultural competency begins to be set under the focus light. Starting from the demand of international business development, intercultural competence training or development now becomes one chief objective of foreign language teaching as well as of international trade. More and more studies have been conducted in the respect of intercultural competence and its training or development. Among the many studies on intercultural competence, there are quite limited empirical researches of which the studies on college students'intercultural competence are even fewer. Given the above situation, this thesis did a survey on the intercultural competence of 160 non-English major undergraduate students from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), aiming to detect the key factors of college students'intercultural competence.Two questionnaires were designed on the basis of the intercultural component model developed by Byram (1994) and adopting the YOGA form proposed by Fantini (2000). Questionnaire I is used to make a self-assessment survey on the student participants. The data processing method---- factor analysis---- was used here to sort out the key factors of student participants'intercultural competence: three factors and one dimension. Questionnaire II is used to examine the weights of the key factors sorted out through the above factor analysis.It was found through this study that the average intercultural competence of Chinese college non-English major students is good; the key factors of students'intercultural competence and their weights are as follows: the factor awareness (12.7%), the factor attitude (34.02%), the factor skills (25.22%) and the knowledge dimension (28.06%) which consists of the factor"I"-culture knowledge (9.61%) and the factor"other"-culture knowledge (18.45%).