A Comparative Case Study On The Intercultural Sensitivity Of Different Levels Of English Majors At Shanxi Normal University

Communicating with people from different cultures has become a basic competence foreveryone in the changing time. Thus, a main concept called intercultural communicationcompetence (ICC), which refers to the ability to effectively and appropriately communicate withpeople of various cultural backgrounds, should be mentioned. How to effectively improve students’intercultural communication competence has raised a wide range of academic concern at home andabroad. As one of important aspects of intercultural communication competence, interculturalsensitivity (ICS) positively correlates with intercultural communication competence, which isverified by many scholars at home and abroad. Therefore, it is useful to cultivate students’intercultural sensitivity in order to enhance students’ intercultural communication competence. Thatis to say, the improvement of students’ intercultural sensitivity has a beneficial effect on theenhancement of students’ intercultural communication competence, which is helpful to theirintercultural communication.An increasing number of scholars at home and abroad have done a lot of research onintercultural sensitivity, while they rarely conduct comparative analysis on the ICS between twodifferent levels of English majors. According to their College Entrance Examination result, studentswho enrolled in English major can be divided into three groups: key university English majors,ordinary college English majors and independent college English majors.70key university Englishmajors and70independent college English majors of Shanxi Normal University are the twodifferent subjects of this research. A comparative analysis on the ICS between these two groups isconducted in this paper. First, the author uses descriptive statistics to show the status quo of the ICSof key university English majors and independent college English majors. And then, independent t-test, correlation analysis and frequency analysis are used to describe the differences of the ICSbetween the two groups and the differences of the five factors of the ICS between the two groups.Moreover, independent t-test and correlation analysis are used to explore the correlation between TEM-4score and their intercultural sensitivity. Lastly, correlation analysis is employed toinvestigate the interrelationship among each factor of the ICS of English majors of key universityand independent college. The results indicate that the level of the ICS of key university Englishmajors is relatively higher than that of independent college English majors, but the differencebetween the two groups is not significant. However, among the five factors of the ICS, thedifferences of Interaction Engagement and Respect for Cultural Differences between the two groupsare significant and the levels of the two factors of key university English majors are higher thanthose of independent college English majors. There is no significant difference on InteractionConfidence, Interaction Enjoyment and Interaction Attentiveness. Furthermore, in terms of TEM-4score, neither key university English majors’ ICS nor independent college English majors’ ICS ispositively correlated with their TEM-4score. Among the five factors of ICS, InteractionAttentiveness is greatly affected by TEM-4score of key university English majors and Respect forCultural Differences is profoundly influenced by TEM-4score of independent college Englishmajors. Finally, each factor of the ICS of English majors of either key university or independentcollege turns out to be in different correlations.Some suggestions on how to improve their intercultural sensitivity are made according tothe results. The author hopes to show the current situation of the ICS of different levels of Englishmajors according to the survey on the level of the ICS of English majors of Shanxi NormalUniversity， which can provide empirical study and reference for intercultural education of Englishmajors.