A Survey on Preservice English Teachers’ Intercultural Communicative Competence in China

Enhancing pupils’ intercultural communication competence (ICC) is a key EFL teaching goal in China and the pre-service English teachers’ ICC plays an essential role in it. This study aims to investigate the pre-service English teachers’ ICC levels and whether there were any differences between their ICC levels and their genders or their family origins in a public university in China. Data were collected from 186 pre-service English teachers by employing Zhong et al.’s (2013) “Intercultural Communication Competence Self Rating Scale (ICCSRS)”. The results showed that the pre-service English teachers’ ICC is only moderate with an average score of 3.20. Among the eight dimensions of the ICC, attitude showed the highest score (3.87) while linguistic competence showed the lowest (2.72). In addition, the study revealed the female pre-service English teachers have higher ICC than the male ones, but there is no difference between the urban and rural pre-service English teachers. As a result of the pre-service English teachers’ low level of ICC, the study suggested that the university should lay more emphasis on the ICC development in the teaching, provide more opportunities to communicate interculturally for the pre-service English teachers, and take a flexible policy in the class division and teaching.


Introduction
With the close relationship between language and culture has been widely acknowledged, intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has become one of the teaching goals in many countries. For example, CEFR (2011) gives considerable importance to the promotion of ICC apart from the focus on the four language skills. The teaching of English as a foreign or second language is not only to enable the students to master a high level of language skills, but also a high level of ICC.
between the five abilities need to be further explored.
To find out the specific components of ICC that need to be delineated for institutions to assess students' ICC, Deardorff (2006) also developed two models of ICC with an attempt to provide guidance for administrators to assess ICC. Deardorff's (2006) pyramid model of ICC consists of three levels: the first level includes the necessary attitudes, the second includes an interactive relationship between knowledge and understanding, and skills: the deeper the understanding of cultural knowledge or information, the faster the improvement of intercultural skills, and vice versa. The third level is the ideal internal result: adaptability, flexibility, national cultural relativity and empathy. The top of the pyramid is the ideal external result, that is, effective and appropriate intercultural communication.
Deardorff's pyramidal model of ICC equates intercultural competence with intercultural communicative competence. It mainly discusses the important relations between knowledge and skills in intercultural communication, which has important methodological implications for the construction of an ICC assessment system.
In China, Wen (1999) believed that ICC consists of communicative competence and intercultural competence. Communicative competence includes linguistic competence, pragmatic competence and strategic competence, and intercultural competence includes sensitivity to cultural differences, tolerance to cultural differences and flexibility in dealing with cultural differences.
Although these models were developed from different research needs and were composed of different structures, they helped researchers to understand ICC in concrete ways. These models shared similarities in requiring language users to have appropriate intercultural attitudes, knowledge, skills and strategies and proposed that effective communication occurs only if the communicators possess the ability to understand and appreciate the differences of others' cultures.

The Assessment of ICC
To help students develop their ICC, an important issue is to assess their ICC levels. Some intercultural specialists have worked on the design of ICC assessment instruments since the 1970s. Ruben (1976) identified seven elements and created a general model for intercultural communication competence. His Intercultural Behavioral Assessment Indices (IBAI) was an instrument to measure ICC. Ruben (1976)) found that Ruben's instrument was mostly reliable; however, he also observed there were disadvantages as well, in that the instrument was too lengthy and imprecise. Byram (1997) listed detailed ICC teaching, learning and assessment objectives from the four savoir dimensions. It required a long observing period and much effort. Kelley and Meyers (1995) developed a "Cross-Cultural Adaptability Inventory (CCAI)" consisting of 50 items. The evaluation elements include emotional adaptability, flexibility, openness, sensitivity and individual autonomy. Hammer et al. (2003) compiled an "Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI)" with 50 questions to measure people's ICC. These measures were mainly developed for ESL learners or employees in America or Europe.
In China, some scholars have tried to adapt or develop ICC assessment instruments for Chinese students. Gao (2014) developed the "Intercultural Communication Competence Inventory for Chinese College Students" (ICCICCS), which consists of two mutually interactive dimensions of "knowing" and "doing". "Knowing" was further divided into three modular of knowledge, awareness, thinking, and "doing" was divided into attitudes, skills, and strategy. Gao's ICCCCS emphasized the interaction of different aspects, but the complete form is not accessible.
Adapted Byram's (1997) and Wen' (1999) models, Zhong at al. (2013)'s developed an ICC model for Chinese English major undergraduates, which included two dimensions, i.e. communicative competence and intercultural competence. Communicative competence includes linguistic competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence and strategic competence, while intercultural competence consists of four components: skills, knowledge, attitude and consciousness. Based on this model, they developed the "Intercultural Communication Competence Self Rating Scale" (ICCSRS) to assess Chinese learners' ICC, which was composed of a total of 76 items. This instrument, being popular and practical in China (Hua, 2019), was adopted as the instrument in this study.

Instrument
This study adapted Zhong et al.'s (2013) ICCSS from 76 items into 50 items by deleting overlapped items, adding more items relating to writing and translation, modifying not-easy-to-answer items. It includes eight subdimensions, and in a 5-point scale, with 1 stands for strongly disagree, 2 for disagree, 3 for undecided, 4 for agree and 5 for strongly agree. It consists of two dimensions: communicative competence which was further divided into linguistic competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence and strategic competence, and intercultural competence which was further divided into intercultural knowledge, attitudes, awareness and skills (See Appendix). The Cronbach's Alpha for the instrument was 0.824, which meant the good internal consistency of the questionnaire.

Participants
All the five intact classes of 201 students in Primary English Education major at their first semester of the fourth year were invited to take part in the survey at the researcher's university, which is a normal university in central China, aiming to cultivate teachers for primary education. The participants were admitted from junior middle schools, and they signed the contracts with their home educational bureaus that require them to return to teach in the countryside schools. Among them, 22 participants were male and 179 were female. Their ages ranged from 17 to 19, and they have had the experiences of English learning for 12 years. While the survey of this research was carrying out, most students did not have any teaching experience.

Data Collection and Data Analysis
The questionnaire was delivered through the online survey platform "wenjuanxing" (www.wjx.cn). With the help of a teacher of these five classes, the researcher went into their classroom, explained the research purposes, and informed of the link on which the questionnaire was posted and invited the participants to complete the questionnaire within five days. Finally, 186 complete responses were collected. Five responses were not complete and 10 students did not give any response, so the valid response rate was 92.5%.
After the data collection, the results were inputted the software SPSS21.0 to sort the data and rescore the reversed items. Cronbach's Alpha was used to test the overall reliability of the scale; descriptive statistics were used to list the average levels and standard deviation of eight sub-categories of pre-service English teachers' ICC; and an independent sample t-test was used to analyze the differences between the pre-service English teachers' ICC and their gender as well as family origins.
In this study, the average scores were used to judge the pre-service English teachers' ICC levels in a total and in different dimensions based on the following criteria: an average score below 2.49 is regarded as a low level, between 2.50 and 2.99 is acceptable. If the average score is between 3.00 and 3.49, the level of the total ICC or the corresponding dimension is moderate. If the average score is above 3.50, the level of the total ICC or the corresponding dimension is high (Sevimel-Sahin, 2020).

Results
The rating scale for pre-service teachers' ICC consists of eight sub-dimensions, that is, linguistic competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, strategic competence, skill, knowledge, attitude, and awareness. This next section presents the results from the overall level of ICC and the relationship between the pre-service English teachers' ICC and gender as well as family background.

The Level of Pre-Service English Teachers' ICC
The scale used in this study is to comprehensively measure the ICC of the pre-service English teachers in a normal university from eight sub-dimensions. The results of the overall level of the ICC and the eight sub-dimensions are presented in Table 1. Among the eight sub-dimensions, the average value of attitude (D6) is the highest, reaching 3.87, and then comes that of strategic competence (D4), which is 3.81. This shows that the pre-service English teachers have a highly positive attitude towards different cultures, a highly strong willingness to communicate interculturally or to overcome communication difficulties with verbal or non-verbal strategies. Awareness (D7) receives an average score of 3.40, which means the pre-service English teachers are moderately sensitive to different cultures and would take a critical attitude towards the cultural differences. Sociolinguistic competence (D2) and skills (D8) receive an average score of 3.28 and 3.23, respectively. This indicates that, in general, the pre-service English teachers have considerable socio-linguistic abilities and skills for coping with intercultural communication.
However, the average scores for the three sub-dimensions of linguistic competence (D1), discourse competence (D3) and knowledge (D5) are only, 2.95, 2.82 and 2.78, respectively. This shows that these three sub-dimensions greatly affected the overall ICC of the pre-service English teachers. Specifically, "linguistic competence" refers to "the ability to master language knowledge and the use of language skills", including phonetic, vocabulary and grammar knowledge, as well as the language skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation (Hu & Gao, 1997). Discourse competence refers to "the ability to organize utterances into cohesive, coherent and complete discourse", including initiate, terminate, or maintain communication (Wen, 1999). And " [intercultural] knowledge" refers to the "knowledge that learners should possess and use in the process of intercultural communication", including "social and cultural knowledge about their own and other's country" and "knowledge about communication processes at personal and social levels" (Byram, 1997).
From the results, it can be concluded that although the pre-service English teachers have a positive attitude towards and good willingness of intercultural communication, they lack sufficient knowledge and linguistic competence to assist their successful intercultural communication.

The Level of Pre-Service English Teachers' ICC in Different Genders
The participants consist of 15 male and 171 female pre-service English teachers.  From Table 2, it can be seen that, in terms of the overall ICC levels, female students scored higher than male students. The result of the test revealed a statistically significant difference between the ICC levels of the first-year students and the fourth-year students (p=.027). As the eight dimensions of ICC are considered, a statistically significant difference was found between the female preservice English teachers and the males in terms of D1 or linguistic competence (p=0.030), D2 or sociolinguistic competence (p=0.024), D3 or discourse competence (p=0.044), D6 or attitudes (p=0.030), D7 or awareness (p=0.016), D8 or skills (p=0.009). However, the independent sample t-test shows that there was no significant difference between female and male pre-service English teachers in terms of D4 or strategic competence (p=0.083) and D5 or knowledge dimension (p=0.079).
In summary, the results show that the female pre-service English teachers have higher ICC levels than male ones in overall and in six sub-dimensions, which means that the gender has a significant effect on the levels of ICC of the participants.

The Level of Pre-Service English Teachers' ICC in Different Family Origins
In this study, family origins refer to the participants' household types, which is divided into agricultural (rural) and non-agricultural (urban) according to their household registration information. The participants in this survey were from different family origins, with 127 students from rural families and 59 from urban families. The results of the pre-service English teachers' ICC levels in different family origins is presented in Table 3. From Table 3, it is found that there is no significant difference between the overall ICC for the pre-service English teachers from urban areas and from rural areas (p=0.126), but the pre-service English teachers from urban areas were a little higher in ICC levels than those from rural areas. As for the eight sub-dimensions, the average scores for seven sub-dimensions of the urban pre-service English teachers are higher than those of rural ones, but the average score of the sociolinguistic competence (D2) of the pre-service English teachers from rural teachers are higher than that of those preservice English teachers from rural areas. Independent sample t-test showed a significant difference in three categories, that is, in D1 or linguistic competence (p=0.002), D5 or knowledge (p=0.027) and D6 or attitudes (p=0.006). This indicates that although there is no significant difference between the overall ICC levels between the participants from urban families and those from rural families, but the participants from urban families are higher in ICC levels in terms of linguistic competence and language knowledge, and have a more positive attitude towards different cultures than those from rural families.

Discussion
The findings of this study revealed that the pre-service English teachers' overall ICC was just moderate (3.20), and the scores of two dimensions of strategic competence (D4) and attitudes (D6) were high, while the scores of the other six dimensions were moderate. This disconfirms Gao's (2014) study in which the overall ICC for English major undergraduates from 16 Chinese universities is satisfactory (3.73), but confirms Hua's (2019) study in which the overall ICC for English major undergraduates at an ethic university is not ideal (3.13). One reason for the inconsistent results was the participants were from different universities. In Gao's study, the participants were mostly from the key universities (985 or 211 universities, which are the top 100 universities among over 2000 universities in China). While in Hua's (2019) study and this study, the participants were from two ordinary local universities, so they did not have a good command of the language knowledge and skills, nor do they have any opportunities to meet or communicate with foreign teachers or visitors like those in the key universities in big cities. In addition, the pre-service English teachers in this study were admitted from junior middle schools, so they had received less English training than those who were admitted from the senior middle schools in other studies. Therefore, to ensure the ICC teaching goal of English teaching, the university should lay special emphasis on training and developing the pre-service English teachers' ICC, since teachers' ICC plays a vital role in the job of teaching. The pre-service English teachers should realize the importance of ICC in their teaching and try to improve it through different channels.
The study found that the pre-service English teachers were high in "attitudes" and "strategic competence" and "awareness" levels, while they were only acceptable in "knowledge", "linguistic competence" and "discourse competence" levels. The results are similar with both Gao's (2014) and Hua's (2019) studies, in which both "attitudes" and "awareness" scored much higher, and "linguistic competence" or "knowledge modular" scored the lowest. This suggests that Chinese students have an open attitude towards and strong willingness to participate the intercultural communication, and have many strategies for coping with the intercultural conversations, but their lack of sufficient vocabulary, grammar, and language skills impede them from effective and appropriate communication. This might be explained that there are not many communicating activities to practice the language acquired. Therefore, it is necessary to provide more opportunities to communicate interculturally for the pre-service English teachers.
This study also found that the female pre-service English teachers have higher ICC levels than the male ones.
The results are in congruence with Gao's (2014) study, and it is explained by the difference between male's and female's brains. Females are better at intuitive thinking, memorizing, and expression; therefore, female English major students' ICC levels are higher than males. This could be one reason for the difference in ICC levels between male and female pre-service English teachers. Another reason might be that the number of males is much less than that of females in the Primary English Program, accounting about 10 percent. Then, in the classes, the males usually keep silent, passively taking part in classroom activities because they lack the support from male peers. Therefore, the results of the difference between males and females' ICC suggest that the university should adopt a more flexible class division policy.
The research also identified that the urban pre-service English teachers are a little higher than rural ones in ICC levels, especially in the sub-dimensions of linguistic competence (D1), knowledge (D5) and attitudes (D6). This might be explained by the difference in the teacher qualities, teaching facilities and methods because rural schools can easily attract good teachers and gain financial support than rural schools. In addition, the location of the schools can exert influence the students' knowledge and awareness, which in turn affect the students' ICC levels even after they enter the university.

Conclusion
In this study, a self-rating scale was used to investigate the pre-service English teachers' ICC levels and the correlations between their ICC levels and their gender as well as family origins at a Chinese public university. The results showed that the average overall ICC of the pre-service English teachers was 3.20, which is moderate. They have positive intercultural communication attitudes (average 3.87), but their intercultural knowledge needs improving (average 2.72).
Concerning the gender, the female pre-service English teachers' ICC overall levels were higher than the males'. Regarding the family origins, there was no significant difference in overall levels between the urban and the rural pre-service English teachers, but the urban ones scored a little higher than the rural ones in most ICC dimensions.
The results suggest that the university should lay more emphasis on the ICC development in the teaching, develop appropriate materials with intercultural knowledge, and provide more opportunities to communicate interculturally for the pre-service English teachers, especially for males and those from rural regions.
Nevertheless, this study has some limitations that should be noticed. Firstly, although the results of the self-assessment inventory presented a significant understanding of the pre-service English teachers' ICC levels, including other methods such as interviews or some objective testing methods would help to achieve a comprehensive evaluation. Secondly, the participants only involved the pre-service English teachers at one university, thus, having participants from more universities may present more evidence on the pre-service teachers' ICC levels. However, these limitations lead to several directions for future research. For example, future research could examine the pre-service teachers' perceptions of ICC and their practices of ICC teaching in the classroom. In addition, to improve the pre-service teachers' ICC levels, it is necessary to explore what factors, such as the institutional or the pre-service teachers' personal factors, may exert influence on their ICC development.