Intercultural Communication in China

Since China’s opening in the 1980s, intercultural communication competence (ICC) has been a focus of the fields of foreign language education (FLE) and comparative cultural studies or intercultural communication studies in China. Approaches to ICC mainly adopt a functional, cognitive-behavioral approach, that is, how to teach or train students or course participants in the knowledge or ways that will tangibly increase their appropriateness and effectiveness in interactions with others. These have progressed from early efforts to enhance communicative language competence and expanded to language and specific cultural knowledge, then to more general notions of cultural awareness and skills, and now increasingly to ICC. Chinese work on ICC largely continues to borrow overseas conceptualizations and adapt them primarily to language learning or teaching contexts, seeking to ...