An Empirical Study On Junior High School Students’ Intercultural Sensitivity

As globalization increases,intercultural interaction becomes more and more important.Research on intercultural communication competence(ICC)and intercultural sensitivity(ICS)are popular in the education field.Studies on ICS conducted at home and abroad mainly focused on the measurement of ICS,the correlations among the five factors of ICS and the influences of demographic factors on ICS.Participants for those studies are mostly teachers,college or university learners and senior high learners.Research on junior high learners is relatively insufficient.The current study aims to answer the following research questions:(a)What is the level of junior high learners’ ICS in Qingdao?(b)Is ICS affected by learners’ gender,school location,time length of attending English tutorial class and parents’ education background? If yes,to what extent is it affected by those factors?(c)What are the impediments of students’ intercultural learning? Applying ISS-15 revised by Wang & Zhou(2016),the study investigated the level of junior high learners’ ICS and the differences in the extent to which their ICS is affected by demographic information.Statistics were analyzed by SPSS 27.0.Then semi-structured interviews with four students were conducted to understand impeding factors of students’ intercultural learning.Results of the questionnaires illustrate that(1)the level of junior high learners’ ICS is relatively high in Qingdao,with Interaction Enjoyment being the highest and Interaction confidence the lowest.(2)In terms of demographic information,there was no significant difference in terms of gender,time length of attending English tutorial class and parents’ education background.However,there was a significant difference concerning school location.The level of ICS of urban learners was higher than that of rural learners.Results of the interview indicate the factors impeding students’ intercultural learning are inadequate intercultural knowledge,monotonous intercultural learning pattern,home culture disturbance and learners’ disorientation,a lack of learning autonomy and reduced learning motivation by exam pressure.In conclusion,this study demonstrates the status quo of junior high learners’ ICS and intercultural learning,enriching our understanding of ICS.The study provides intercultural teaching and training with frame of reference as well as suggestions for textbook editing and English-teaching policy.