On the Western Overseas Students’ Intercultural Communication Competence in Their Chinese Application Letter Writing

Abstract

For a second foreign language learner, writing an application letter in target language is not only a test for the level of target language, but also a process of intercultural communication. This paper attempts to explore the manifestation and performance of some western overseas students’ intercultural communication competence in their Chinese application letter compositions which are collected from a dynamic composition corpus. Through the analysis of collected corpus, it aims to identify how overseas students situated in different culture can communicate in a target language through a written form and what kind of thinking pattern they hold exists in their application letter writing, which may influence their cross-cultural communication. The result of this research suggests that intercultural communication competence of western overseas students still need to be improved.