A Quantitative Corpus Approach to Assessing Students’ ICC Development in a College English Course in Mainland China

This paper aims to develop a way of assessing twenty Chinese college students’ development of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) in one semester in an Audio-visual College English Course in Mainland China by quantitative AntConc Keyword List analysis of the students’ four batches of Mandarin Chinese reflective journals kept at regular intervals during one semester. The assessment is with reference to two Chinese scholars Zhang & Yang’s (2012) model of ICC. As revealed by the AntConc Keyword List analysis, the words related to Zhang & Yang’s (2012) model of ICC move gradually from the Negative Keyword Lists to the Positive Keyword Lists, which indicates that students’ ICC developed to different degrees during the course.