Dan Empirical Study Of The Impacts Of Short-term Study Abroad On Chinese College Students’ Development Of Intercultural Communication Competence

With the continuous globalization of the world,the relations of economy,politics and culture among countries have become closer.Personnel exchanges are getting more frequent.In the background of such an era,some new requirements are brought to our domestic education,that is,talents with intercultural communication competence should be cultivated.Nowadays,with the gradual internationalization of higher education,more and more college students have the opportunities to participate in study abroad projects which are widely regarded as effective ways to improve participants’ intercultural communication competence.The data of Chinese Ministry of Education show that there have been 2,518,000 students going abroad to pursue their studies from 2016 to 2019.In recent years,the short-term study abroad project gains lots of attention.Because of the advantages in time and economic investment,it is more and more popular with college students.Although the number of the researches on studying abroad is increasing,the relevant researches on short-term study abroad are still not enough,especially in empirical research.This research adopts the Integrated Model of Intercultural Communication Competence created by Arasaratnam,Banerjee and Dembek in 2010 as its theoretical basis and the combination approach of questionnaires and interviews to investigate the impacts of the short-term study abroad on intercultural communication competence from the following aspects,including experience,motivation,empathy,global attitude and interaction involvement.It figures out the changes of these five components of students’ intercultural communication competence and the reasons of theses changes.The statistics of the students’ intercultural communication competence is gathered before and after their short-term study abroad through “Wenjuanxing” and analyzed via SPSS.105 questionnaires are collected.The first questionnaire contains22 questions except for the basic information of the participants,whose Cronbach’s Alpha is 0.855 and KMO value is 0.867.There are 23 questions in the second questionnaire whose Cronbach’s Alpha is 0.831 and KMO value is 0.768.Then the in-depth information is collected by interviews to explore the reasons of their increases on intercultural communication competence.This research is to evaluate the benefits of the short-term study abroad aiming to offer some constructive references to the domestic cultivation of students’ intercultural communication competence.The result indicates that the short-term study abroad has an active impact on students’ intercultural communication competence which is improved on the whole.However,the research also shows that there are unbalanced increases on various aspects in different degrees with the relatively obvious changes of motivation,empathy and interaction involvement.Thus,it is necessary to explore the reasons of this phenomenon for the improvement of the short-term overseas projects and domestic intercultural training.