Study on the Intercultural Competence of Students in Hainan Vocational Colleges

Against the background of the development of the Hainan Free Trade Port, an empirical study was carried out to investigate the intercultural competence of vocational college students in Hainan from the knowledge, attitude, skills and awareness dimensions. In this study, the knowledge dimension is reflected by the knowledge of domestic and foreign culture; the attitude dimension refers to students’ openness, respect for others and willingness to interact with people from other cultures; the skill dimension focuses on the cognitive ability and communication skills of intercultural communication; and the awareness dimension focuses on students’ awareness of cultural differences and recognition of their own identities. Therefore, the intercultural competence of vocational college students in Hainan Province is studied on the basis of the following six factors of the four dimensions: knowledge of domestic and foreign culture, attitude, cognitive ability and communication skills related to intercultural communication and awareness. The results indicate that college students’ cognitive ability in intercultural communication is the greatest, followed by their knowledge of domestic culture, attitude, communication skills and awareness, which are all above average. Their knowledge of foreign culture is below average. The overall intercultural competence of Hainan vocational college students is below average, which is not satisfactory. The analytical results also show that each factor among the four dimensions is positively correlated with each other.