rs working abroad, such as the Peace Corp volunteers, in the1950s, 1960s and early 1970s (Sinicrope et al., 2007). As of late 1970s and 1980s,the contexts had expanded to studying abroad, intercultural training, overseasexpatriates and immigrant acculturation. In those early years, the purposes ofintercultural assessment were mainly “(1) to explain overseas failure, (2) to predictoverseas success, (3) to develop personnel selection strategies, and (4) to design,implement and test sojourner training and preparation methodologies (Ruben,1989:230, cf. Sinicrope et al., 2007:2)”. Individuals’ attitudes, personalities, valuesand motives were assessed by short self-reports, surveys or open-ended interviewsin early period. Nowadays intercultural competence researches have alreadystretched to a wide range of fields from foreign language education to medicaltraining and the assessment approaches have also evolved from short attitude andpersonality surveys to more complex behavioral self-assessments, performanceassessments, portfolio assessment, etc.Intercultural competence assessments can be generally divided into threecategories, direct assessment, indirect assessment, and combination of the formertwo methods. The majority of indirect assessment tools are self-report inventories inthe form of Likert scale, while direct assessments of intercultural competenceinclude performance assessment, portfolio assessment, interviews, etc. Sinicrope etal. (2007) reviews the major intercultural competence assessment approaches andinstruments constructed by researchers from late 1970s to 2006 comprehensively.One of the earliest intercultural competence assessment frameworks is Ruben’s Behavioral Assessment Scale for Intercultural Competence (BASIC), a behavioralapproach to link the gap between what individuals perceive to be interculturallycompetent and their actual behaviours in intercultural situations (Ruben, 1976;Ruben & Kealey, 1979, cf. Sinicrope et al., 2007:3). Ruben (1976) identifies sevendimension of intercultural competence, including display of respect, interactionposture, orientation to knowledge, empathy, self-oriented role behavior, interactionmanagement, and tolerance for ambiguity (Ruben, 1976:339-341, cf. ibid). Theseseven dimensions of intercultural competence are measured with four-point ratingscales by assessors based on observation of individuals’ actions. Ruben’s BASICassessment framework is regarded as the pioneer in performance assessment ofintercultural competence. Later the dimension of self-oriented role behavior isfurther subdivided into three distinct dimensions: task-related roles, relational roles,and individualistic roles (Ruben & Kealey, 1979, cf.ibid). Based on Ruben andKealey’s work, Koester and Olebe (1988) further rephrase the nine-dimension scalefor untrained assessors and add an overall ICC score.
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2.2 Previous studies on intercultural competence assessment in China
Intercultural competence studies in China are mainly discussed by scholars in thefield of foreign language teaching (FLT) (e.g. Chen et al., 2006; Yu, 2006; Zhang,2007, 2012; Gui, 2012; Zhang& Yang, 2012; Zhao, 2014), especially with regard tointercultural competence theoretical models (Jia, 1997; Hu& Gao, 1998; Wen,1999etc. cf. Chen et al., 2006; Yang & Zhuang, 2007; Xu, 2011) and the relationshipbetween language proficiency and intercultural competence (e.g. Liu, 2008; Bai,2012). Compared with the abundant assessment tools of intercultural competence inwestern contexts, there has only been a rather small portion of studies hitherto thatare focused on intercultural competence assessment in Chinese context (Wang, 1990cf. Peng et al., 2015; Liu, 2008; Wu et al., 2013; Zhong et al., 2013; Fan et al., 2013;Gao, 2014; Wu, 2014; Peng et al., 2015).
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C
