Intercultural Sensitivity And Intercultural Communicative Competence

Acceleration of globalization of world economy and cultures calls for more and more talents engaging in intercultural communication, thus, the new Teaching Syllabus for English Majors sets developing students’ intercultural communicative competence as one goal of English teaching and learning in tertiary education. So far, a certain number of studies have been conducted on examining English majors’intercultural sensitivity and intercultural communicative competence, which have shown that students’ intercultural communicative competence is greatly far behind their language proficiency. Then some pedagogical suggestions were put forward to improve the quality of cultural teaching in foreign language learning and teaching. However, research on measuring normal university English majors’ intercultural sensitivity and their intercultural communicative competence is insufficient. In view of the above reasons, the present study investigates the status quo of English majors’ intercultural sensitivity and intercultural communicative competence at two normal universities and identifies the main causes for their undesirable performances in intercultural communication.On the basis of the previous studies, this thesis examines students’ intercultural sensitivity and intercultural communicative competence, as well as the effect of intercultural sensitivity on their intercultural communicative competence through testing and comparing English majors’ potential performance in intercultural communication, which took place in Shaanxi Normal University and Yili Normal University respectively. This study is carried out in both quantitative and qualitative approaches, for which 404 English undergraduates were surveyed, and 5 foreign teachers and 16 students were interviewed.By analyzing the data collected, the author of this thesis found that only a small number of examinees’ performances were desirable while many students felt unconfident in intercultural communication and appeared not so sensitive to cultural differences, most of which were due to negative cultural transfer. Through data analysis, effects of English students’intercultural sensitivity on their intercultural communicative competence can be learned from three aspects, namely respect for cultural differences, interaction engagement and interaction confidence. In addition, Pearson Correlation Coefficient analysis shows that there is positive correlation between students’ intercultural communicative competence and their cultural knowledge. Even though this finding was less than conclusive, it may give some insight to teachers and students.According to the results above, pedagogical suggestions are proposed to improve students’ intercultural sensitivity and to develop their intercultural communicative competence, such as to enrich students’cultural schema, to cultivate their motivation of intercultural engagement and to help them acquire differences and similarities between different cultures. Finally, this study can be furthered by larger scaled diachronic research, and more scientific and reasonable measurements are expected in this field.