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Effects of Intercultural Competence and Social Contact on Speech Act Production in a Chinese Study Abroad Context
Author(s) -
TAGUCHI NAOKO,
XIAO FENG,
LI SHUAI
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
the modern language journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.486
H-Index - 83
eISSN - 1540-4781
pISSN - 0026-7902
DOI - 10.1111/modl.12349
Subject(s) - psychology , openness to experience , study abroad , social psychology , intercultural competence , adaptability , autonomy , social influence , beijing , communicative competence , social environment , china , pedagogy , sociology , political science , social science , ecology , law , biology
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.