Implementing the Rabat Commitment: The Development of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) as a Pedagogical Framework in a Chinese Educational Context.
Globalization has led to an increasingly interconnected and integrated world on a scale unparalleled in human history. The convergence of cultures and civilizations within this ever-shrinking world is contrasted with the emergence of entities and ideologies that seek to diverge from this common thread of humanity, to dam the tide of globalization in their aspirations to return to nostalgic perceptions of ways before; the world may have become smaller, but it has become ever more fractious. Developing intercultural education through ICC remains at the forefront of both international and national policy agendas: from the United Nations to the Chinese Government, the need to implement ICC within institutions and classrooms and the pressing need to produce interculturally-competent individuals have become key determinants in driving educational policies and guidelines, from the Sustainable Development Goals to the Education 2030 Agenda, from the Community of Shared Future for Mankind to the Belt and Road Initiative. This thesis aims to examine the potential of a Chinese University to develop and implement ICC within the context of English as a foreign language courses for Chinese undergraduate students primarily majoring in STEM fields. This research aims to establish understandings of the current state of intercultural education in China, including policy, theory, and practice – which would yield insights on how ICC is conceptualized and potentially implemented by stakeholders within the Chinese higher educational sector. Using an exploratory-triangulation design, both qualitative and quantitative data were collected from one Chinese Double-First Class University. Findings were analyzed and triangulated to form a comprehensive picture of practical perspectives pertaining to intercultural education, which were subsequently compared with current political and theoretical conceptualizations of both ICC and the interculturally-competent learner. Findings and subsequent analysis show that within the Chinese context via College English courses, ICC development is both feasible and implementable, despite areas where Chinese understandings of intercultural competence have diverged substantially from established Anglophone models and assumptions. Realization of the potential for ICC within Chinese higher education requires adaptation of current models and assumptions of ICC to the realities of the Chinese higher educational context, including the transformation of prevailing models into actionable frameworks for real-world implementation in the College English classroom
