From Cultural Awareness to Communicative Confidence: Diagnosing and Developing Intercultural Communicative Competence in Chinese University Japanese Majors

Abstract

As an important talent-training base, colleges and universities need to cultivate high-quality Japanese professionals to provide strong support for friendly exchanges between China and Japan. Influenced by cultural differences, many students find Japanese learning difficult and lack enthusiasm, and this motivational deficit is empirically substantial: a survey of Chinese Japanese majors found that 78.48% had experienced motivational decline, attributable to factors including difficulty in applying knowledge, insufficient sense of achievement, and the gap between learners' origins and urban contexts. At the same time, students' intercultural knowledge is unevenly developed—questionnaire data show that learners have relatively deep awareness of Sino-Japanese differences in verbal communication styles and social etiquette, but insufficient understanding of nonverbal behavioral differences and underlying Japanese social values, because their exposure to intercultural content is confined largely to three courses, namely Intercultural Communication, Japanese Overview, and Basic Japanese; instruction relies predominantly on textual analysis and audiovisual cases, with few practical activities or comparative-cultural instruction, even though students explicitly expect interactive formats such as group discussion.