A Study Of The Influence Of Overseas Experience On Chinese College Students’ Intercultural Communication Competence

As the process of globalization goes on, people’s global awareness is strengtheningday by day, people from different social and cultural backgrounds interact with eachother more than ever before. Therefore, intercultural communication has become a partof people’s daily lives. To cultivate and improve college students’ interculturalcommunication competence has been so urgent in the current world. Consequently, tostudy abroad has been an important choice for the college students in today’s China.Various kinds of overseas programs emerge with amazing speed. The number ofstudents studying abroad is increasing year by year. Studying abroad has been a currenttrend in China now.According to literature review, in the other countries, there have been many studieson the effects of overseas experiences on students’ intercultural communicationcompetence in recent years, while there are few studies on this kind of topics in China.In line with the above consideration, this study aims to comprehensively explore theimpact of overseas experiences on the development of Chinese college students’intercultural communication competence. Model of intercultural communicationcompetence put forward by Zhang Hongling (2007) is adopted by this study, whichconsists of three aspects: cognitive, affective, and behavioral interculturalcommunication competence. Then questionnaires are employed as instruments of thisinvestigation to collect the original data for this study, and these questionnaires areadministered to three groups. The distribution of questionnaires lasts more than half ayear and finally272valid questionnaires are collected. The Independent Sample T-testof statistical software SPSS17.0is adopted to analyze these collected data to fulfill thepurpose of investigating the effects of overseas experiences on students’ interculturalcommunication competence and investigating the influence of the length of beingabroad, major and gender on the development of students’ intercultural communicationcompetence.The experimental results show that: first, the overseas experience plays a positiverole in the development of students’ intercultural communication competence, theintercultural communication competence of students with overseas experience isobviously better than that of students without overseas experience; second, the length ofbeing abroad plays a positive role in the development of students’ intercultural communication competence, the intercultural communication competence of studentswith longer duration of being abroad is obviously better than that of students withshorter duration of being abroad; third, in terms of the influence of major on thedevelopment of students’ intercultural communication competence, there is significantdifference in behavioral intercultural communication competence between Englishmajors and non-English majors with shorter duration of being abroad, while there is nosignificant difference in three aspects between English majors and non-English majorswith longer duration of being abroad; fourth, in terms of the influence of gender on thedevelopment of students’ intercultural communication competence, there is significantdifference in cognitive and behavioral intercultural communication competence betweenmen students and women students with shorter duration of being abroad, while there isno significant difference in three aspects between men students and women studentswith longer duration of being abroad.This study has proposed a few suggestions for the intercultural communicationteaching according to the major findings in this research. However, there still exist afew limitations of the present research due to the small samples, limited researchconditions and the author’s capability, which need to be improved in the follow-upresearch.