In recent years, universities and colleges have established intercultural communication related courses to foster students’ intercultural communication competence. The main purpose is to improve students’ internationalization ability, so that more students can improve their future competitiveness. Since Hymes (1972) proposed the communicative competence, scholars have offered and discussed intercultural communication competence in depth (Ruben 1976, Gudykunst 1997, Kim 1992, Spitzberg 2000 among many others). Intercultural communication is based on a verbal or non-verbal communication among individuals of different cultures (Kim 2001, Emert & Pearson 2007, Lawrence 2011, Jeanty 2012). Due to the differences in the cultural background of two different cultural customs, lifestyles, ways of thinking, intercultural knowledge has become indispensable in learning foreign languages. Developing intercultural communication competence has become an important part of foreign language teaching and research (Payne 2004, Byram 2000).
The purpose of this study is to understand college students’ difficulties in learning intercultural communication competence in writing, and their expectations of intercultural communication in such an environment. The subjects were 46 college students who had taken Advanced English Writing course based on intercultural communication competence for seven weeks. The research method is to collect students’ opinions and attitudes towards intercultural communication through questionnaire survey. The results of the questionnaire are analyzed by descriptive statistics, independent T-test and One-way Anova, and the open-ended questions are used to attain their deeper understanding and needs of intercultural communication. Research suggestions derived from the study will be provided from the aspects of curriculum design, teaching contents and assessment.

 

intercultural communicative competence，college students, writing