A Study On Intercultural Communicative Competence Of International Business And Trade Students Based On The Model Of Byram

With the growth of economic globalization and the promotion of the Belt and Road national strategy,connections among countries are becoming closer and closer,which increases the frequency of the communication among people.In the commercial field,an increasing number of people realize the significance of intercultural communicative competence(abbreviated as ICC).Employers’ need for talents features the characteristic of relatively high level of ICC and a good understanding of knowledge of international business and trade.At the same time,a large number of scholars pay their attention to the study of ICC to explore the cultivation of it energetically.On the basis of Byram’s ICC model,this thesis is intended to study international business and trade students’ ICC,aiming to investigate the current situation of students’ ICC,explore its internal characteristics and analyze the reasons for the characteristics.Meanwhile,from the perspective of the improvement of ICC,it provides suggestions for English teaching of this major.This research is analyzed with a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches in accordance with the data collected from students’ questionnaire and teachers’ interview.The questionnaire is mainly comprised by the ICC self-assessment scale,which is designed with reference to Fantini’s ICC(YOGA Form)strictly.Questionnaires are filled by sophomore and junior undergraduates majoring in international business and trade from the school of management,Xi’an Polytechnic University.147 students participate in filling the questionnaire.5 College English teachers are selected randomly for the interview to know their cognition of international business and trade students’ ICC.The teaching situation of the cultivation of ICC,as well as suggestions for the improvement of ICC are included in the interview.With the aid of SPSS,collected data are analyzed.On the basis of the analysis,the general situation of international business and trade students’ ICC,the characteristics of ICC and reasons for these characteristics are studied.Research findings show that,generally speaking,even though the internationalbusiness and trade students’ ICC is at a relatively high level,it is imbalanced.The internal characteristics of students’ ICC are that the awareness dimension,attitude dimension and skill dimension are at a relatively high level and the knowledge dimension is at the medium level.These internal characteristics of ICC mainly result from three respects.Firstly,students are willing to improve their ICC because of their cognition to the major.However,it is their less frequency of communicating with people from other cultures that influences their ICC.Additionally,there is not enough intercultural knowledge teaching in college English classes.Thirdly,in terms of the course design for this major,the number and structure of English-related courses remain to be improved.