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With the continuous enhancement of China’s economic strength and the constant deepening and expansion of international exchanges and cooperation, Chinese language teaching is booming overseas. They are a main force of overseas Chinese language education. Ever since 2004, China has been sending volunteer Chinese language teachers all over the world. Volunteer Chinese language teachers carry out the mission of teaching Chinese language and promoting Chinese culture overseas, and make important contributions to meet the needs of Chinese language learning around the world and deepen the understanding between China and the world. Their intercultural communication competence is directly related to whether they can adapt to life overseas and carry out Chinese teaching successfully. In order to construct a theoretical framework of intercultural communication competence of volunteer Chinese language teachers, this paper, based on Spitzberg’s and Chen Guoming & Starosta’s definitions of intercultural communication competence and Professional Competence Standards for International Chinese Language Teachers, this paper first defines the intercultural communication competence and clarifies the five elements of intercultural communication of volunteer Chinese language teachers based on the five elements of intercultural communication competence proposed by Byram. Then, on the bases of Belay’s “Interactive- multicultural building” model and other scholars’ researches on intercultural communication competence at cognitive, emotional and behavioral levels, this paper points out that Chinese culture emphasizes the unity of knowledge and practice, besides the knowledge of intercultural communication is the foundation of intercultural communication competence, the cognitive level of intercultural communication competence of volunteer Chinese language teachers should include the understanding and mastery of different cultural knowledge about China and the countries in which they teach Chinese and the intercultural communication theoretical knowledge. Thus, the study about intercultural communication competence of volunteer Chinese language teachers should include the cognitive (knowledge) level, the emotional level and the behavioral level. In addition, based on Standards for International Chinese Teachers and Professional Competence Standards for International Chinese Language Teachers, and the three scales for measuring intercultural communication competence put forward by Chen Guoming’s together with the scales revised by Ren Xiaofei, the study puts forward three scales of intercultural communication awareness, sensitivity and effectiveness for measuring intercultural communication competence of volunteer Chinese language teachers and the corresponding expert evaluation scales. Next, based on the theory of teacher development, this paper proposes the development stage of international Chinese education volunteers, which lays a theoretical foundation for the questionnaire survey. Finally, the intercultural communication identity construction of volunteer Chinese language teachers is proposed to enrich the theoretical framework. This research is divided into two parts, the first part is a self-evaluation of the development of their intercultural communication competence of volunteer Chinese language teachers based on the survey before and after teaching, along with the interview. In this part, 137 volunteer Chinese language teachers who teach in different countries are surveyed and 15 of them are interviewed, along with 5 former volunteer Chinese language teachers who are still teaching Chinese language abroad. The second part is the evaluation and interview of the experts on the intercultural communication competence of volunteer Chinese language teachers. In this part, 20 experts in related fields were surveyed and 9 of them were interviewed. Based on the comparison of the volunteer teachers’ self-evaluation questionnaires before and after teaching and the experts’ questionnaire, this paper examined the development status of their intercultural communication competence in the perspectives of intercultural awareness, intercultural sensitivity and intercultural effectiveness, and finds out that the overall development of their intercultural communication competence shows an upward trend, but there are some differences in the development of these three dimensions. Generally speaking, the development of their intercultural communication awareness dimension is greater than that of intercultural communication sensitivity and intercultural communication effectiveness. The survey also finds out that volunteer Chinese language teachers have the following problems in their intercultural communication competence development, they are insufficient intercultural communication knowledge , superficial in their understanding of Chinese culture, inadequate in their attention to and respect for “detailed” cultural differences, not having enough interaction confidence and interaction relaxation, and further improvement in information skills and identity maintenance ability are still needed. Based on volunteers’ feedback and experts’ advice, together with the materials from Language Cooperation Center website and the intercultural communication cases provided by the interviewed volunteer Chinese language teachers, this paper analyzes the various factors that affect the development of the intercultural communication competence of volunteer Chinese language teachers. On this basis, suggestions are put forward from three aspects: the strategies the countries and schools in which they teach can adopt, the improvement of volunteer Chinese language teachers’ competence and career planning, and the advancement of talent training and selection mode in China, thus to explore the ways and effective strategies to improve their intercultural communication competence. This paper makes an attempt to construct the theory of intercultural communication competence of volunteer Chinese language teachers, and carries out a relatively extensive investigation and research, and actively explores the strategies for improving intercultural communication competence of volunteer Chinese language teachers. However, there are still some shortcomings in this study, it is necessary to further enrich and improve the relevant theoretical system, strengthen the cross-disciplinary study to draw on the theories and methods of other disciplines, expanding research horizons and ideas, pay more attention to on-the-spot investigation and empirical research to deepen data and case analysis, study intercultural communication competence of volunteer Chinese language teachers in different countries and regions, delve the application and promotion of research findings and focus more on the sustainability of the research. |
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