An Investigation Into Intercultural Sensitivity Of College Non-English Majors And Its Cultivation

Increased attention has been paid to intercultural sensitivity(ICS) in themulticultural and globalizing world with rapid development of the research onintercultural communication competence(ICC), as ICS is an important component inICC. In view of cultivating people’s ICC, improving their ICS to other cultures isdeemed to be the first step. In the case of college English teaching, improving collegestudents’ intercultural sensitivity should begin with the assessment of their ICS.In this paper, Chen&Starosta’s theory on intercultural communicationcompetence and especially on ICS is introduced as the theoretical framework. The papermainly focuses on the assessment of ICS, an assessment investigation was made on theICS of over300college students from8college English classes in Hubei University ofTechnology, majoring in arts, science and engineering with the Intercultural SensitivityScale(ISS), which developed by Chen&Starosta. After data collection, a quantitativeanalysis was made in order to objectively and statistically evaluate college non-Englishmajors’ average level of ICS, and to grasp college non-English majors’ characteristicsconcerning the following five dimensionalities included in the ISS: interculturalengagement, respect for cultural differences, interaction confidence, interactionenjoyment and interaction attentiveness. These constitute the first part of investigation.In the second part of investigation, the subjects from four classes which obtainedthe highest average scores in all8college English classes have been chosen to take partin another survey with the questionnaires designed by the author, which contains itemsthat may influence subjects’ ICS, and the English teachers of these four classes havealso been interviewed. The results of these two parts of the investigation were analysedand discussed, forming the first hand data for further researchers to grasp the currentsituations of intercultural sensitivity of our college non-English majors. Besides, thebarriers which obstruct students’ ICC and the factors which influence interculturalsensitivity were explored and summarized.At last, some suggestions to improve IS of college non-English majors wereproposed.