Effects of Intercultural Competence and Social Contact on Speech Act Production in a Chinese Study Abroad Context

This study investigated the effects of intercultural competence and amount of social contact in the development of pragmatic knowledge. All these variables were time‐varying variables and measured twice over a 3‐month study abroad. Participants were 109 American college students studying Chinese in a semester study‐abroad program in Beijing. Using Kelley & Meyers's (1995) instrument, intercultural competence—defined as one's potential to succeed in intercultural adjustment—was measured by 4 factors: emotional resilience, flexibility/openness, perceptual acuity, and personal autonomy. A survey was used to assess the amount of time spent on a variety of social activities in Chinese. Pragmatic knowledge was measured with a spoken task, which assessed participants’ ability to produce speech acts ( k = 24). Latent Growth Curve Modeling showed that cross‐cultural adaptability and social contact, when combined, explained 26% of pragmatic gains. Cross‐cultural adaptability had no significant direct effect to speech acts gains: It had indirect effects through social contact.