An Empirical Study on Non-English Majors' Ability to Express Chinese Culture in English

Cross-cultural communicative ability is an important ability that college students should have in modern society. A successful cross-cultural communication is based on several factors. The basic one is the understanding of the target language culture. In order to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings it is necessary for college students to know western culture and also form the ability to express Chinese culture appropriately in English. This paper did an empirical study among non-English majors to test the present ability and the differences between college students who passed CET-4 and those who did not. The results showed that the former performed better than the latter, but both were far from satisfying. Based on these findings, this paper provides some measures to enhance their ability in this field.