A Study On Guilin College English Teachers’ Intercultural Communication Competence

With the deepening reform of foreign language teaching, cultivating learners’ intercultural communication competence (ICC) becomes an essential objective in teaching. Teachers play an indispensable role in the realization of the objective, especially college English teachers. To train learners’ intercultural awareness, and strengthen their intercultural sensitivity and behavioral flexibility, the teachers’high level of ICC is a guarantee to the improvement of students’ICC. However, empirical studies on teachers’ ICC are few, scattered and small-scaled samples.It is requisite to explore the current level of teachers’ ICC and factors that facilitate or hinder their ICC development. In the study, subjects are randomly selected from Guilin colleges/universities. The thesis aims to investigate Guilin college teachers’ICC level and factors, such as gender difference, professional title, teaching major, teaching grade, participation in intercultural communication (IC) course or training, and going abroad, that may have significant differences on the subjects’ICC.According to Chen and Starosta (1997,2000), ICC includes three levels: cognitive level, affective level and behavioral level. Based on the theory proposed by Chen and Starosta, the thesis evaluates and analyzes the subjects’intercultural awareness, intercultural sensitivity and behavioral aspect of ICC. The valid subjects in total are118English teachers from seven colleges/universities in Guilin. They are participated in the study by completing two questionnaires:intercultural communication competence inventory (ICCI) and intercultural sensitivity scale (ISS).The data was analyzed through computing into SPSS11.5. Through t-test and one-way ANOVA analysis, the following are the major findings:firstly, the statistic results indicate that Guilin college English teachers’ current ICC is on an average level and in an unbalanced distribution. Their intercultural awareness is on a higher level while their behavioral aspect is on a relatively low level. Secondly, gender difference has significant effects on the subjects’ ICC, and males obtain higher scores on ICC than that of females, especially in behavioral aspect. Thirdly, no significant relationship is found between professional title, teaching grade, teaching major and the overall level of ICC. Yet they display significance on the three aspects of ICC to some extent:subjects teaching senior students are more intercultural sensitive than that of those teaching juniors; the higher professional title of a teacher is with, the higher scores he/she gains on intercultural awareness. Moreover, the higher professional title the subjects are with, the lower level they are on the behavioral aspect on the contrary.Finally, there is no significant difference between participation in IC training/course, going abroad and ICC. Furthermore, on behavioral aspect, subjects who have not taken any kind of IC training/course and those who have not been abroad both obtain higher scores than that of those have.These results probably are caused by that subjects who have not been abroad are working with English speakers, thus, they have much intercultural experiences, while those subjects who have overseas experiences are living with Chinese when they are at abroad, consequently, they seldom communicate with people from English-speaking cultures. Besides, IC training in Guangxi needs improvement to enhance college English teachers’ICC, especially behavioral aspect of ICC.