ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews contemporary intercultural competence theories and models. Specifically, a critical review of theoretical concepts and frameworks will be presented, such as Milton Bennett’s developmental model of intercultural sensitivity, Byram’s intercultural communication competence model, and Deardorff’s process model of intercultural competence. These theoretical frameworks have been widely adopted to understand intercultural competence in different sociocultural contexts. However, relatively few studies have critically compared and analyzed the differences of these concepts and frameworks. Meanwhile, little research has attempted to adopt these concepts to understand Chinese students’ intercultural competence “at home”. Moreover, this chapter also analyzes the intercultural competence or intercultural communicative competence concepts from the Chinese perspective, which can provide a comparative analysis of intercultural communication competence, for example, Yongchen Gao’s Zhi Xing He Yi (知行合一) model of Chinese college students’ intercultural competence. Based on the analysis of these intercultural competence theories, this chapter finally justifies the rationale of employing Deardorff’s process model of intercultural competence as the framework in this research.
