Research Purpose and Significance

Good literature is the reflection of culture and a precise cohesion of culture. In addition to providing a large number of relevant cultural background knowledge, but also has specific real and vivid cultural context. Can foreign literary woks reading deeply affect college students' cross-cultural competence? This paper, from the perspective of the foreign literature reading, with respondents of variety kinds of college students, to quest the specific influence of reading foreign literary works on college students' cross-cultural communication ability, to explore how to use the foreign literature to improve the cross-cultural communicative competence.

Literature Review

Wikipedia defines intercultural competence as a range of cognitive, affective, and behavioural skills that lead to communicate effectively and appropriately with people of other cultures. Actually, The concept of intercultural competency began in the 1950s with a focus on the description of the personality traits of successful expatriates.

Some scholars define cross-cultural competence from personality and attitude. These often mentioned personality traits including sympathy, the degree of tolerance of uncertainty, self-centered role behavior, cultural awareness, open mind, "respect for cultural difference", and "adaptation".(Bolten, 2007:211). People with these characteristics are more likely to adapt to different cultures and accept the inconveniences that may arise. There are also some characteristics that are considered to be strong intercultural competence, including self-confidence, optimism, independence, calmness, initiative, etc. (Hawes. F.and Kealey D.J.1979)

Some scholars have defined this in terms of cultural differences. Both M.Meyer and Bausinger believe that "cross-cultural competence is an individual's ability to respond flexibly to different cultural behaviors, cultural attitudes and cultural expectations. Cross-cultural capabilities also include the ability to maintain self-identity during intercultural mediation and to help others maintain their self-identity. (Meyer M., 2003:122~139; Bausinger, 2003, 258)

In Renzhong Peng and Weiping wu`s Research on Chinese College students intercultural contact pathways from the perspective of intercultural competence in Foreign Language World in 2016, they believe the researches of contact of many other scholars show that their are two main intercultural contacts from the perspective of intercultural competence. One is the immediate contact, including the oral and written language interaction between the native speaker of target language and non-native speaker , which is immediate spoken language contact and immediate written contact. The other one is indirect contact, which is indirect interpersonal contact and indirect cultural product contact, including variety of cultural product and medium contact of target language. For example, TV, movies, books, journals, newspaper and Internet, etc. ( Clément ＆ Kruidenier 1983; Pettigrew ＆ Tropp 2000; Campbell 2003; Liaw 2003，2006; Kormos ＆

Csizér 2007). Moreover, in the fifth pathway “cultural product”is relatively more important in intercultural indirect contact, including five observational variable. They are learning online lessons, reading printing books and e-book and learning electronic newspapers and magazines. Indirect contact can promote students` intercultural competence. Among them, the indirect intercultural contact which is based on electronic BBS and online reading, especially reading normative literature works have many positive effects on students' cross-cultural ability.

In Enlu Yan`s An analysis of the application of English and American classics in college English teaching in 2017, she points out that the process of British and American classic literature works`reading and learning can help students understand the cultural traditions of English-speaking countries, enjoy the beauty of English and learn the history of English-speaking countries with further widen of students`horizon. And then improve their verbal comprehensive ability. On the other hand, students make full use of the British and American classic literature works to provide themselves with complementary knowledge of British and American cultural background. With this kind of virtuous circle, students cultivate their literature quality of appreciation of British and American classic literature works, and finally help students to deepen their understanding of British and American culture, experience the beauty of English language and cultivate their intercultural communication awareness and artistic appreciation ability.

In Junshe Mao and Dan Xia`s Approaches to Cultivating Students' Cross-cultural Communicative Competence in College English Teaching (2017), they think strengthening students extracurricular reading and practice is a systematic project to cultivate students`s intercultural communicative competence. Because of limited class time and other factors; it`s far from enough to depend on classroom teaching to meet the requirements of cultivating students’ cross-cultural communicative competence. Therefore, it requires students to strengthen their own cross-cultural communication skills, especially the study of foreign cultural knowledge. Teachers in teaching should guide and require students to carry out extracurricular reading and practice, and to learn foreign cultural knowledge autonomously in order to lay a solid foundation for corresponding knowledge of the intercultural communication ability. On the other hand, cross-cultural communicative competence is a long-term task which cannot be achieved overnight and needs long time of accumulation. Students should have extensive reading in their daily lives and accumulate actively knowledge of western cultural background information in the process to increasingly elevate the interest of reading and accumulation of cultural knowledge. Beside, it takes a long time to cultivate intercultural communicative competence, and it can’t be achieved overnight, but it requires students to accumulate cross-cultural knowledge for a longer time. Students should increase their reading in their daily study and life, according to the actual English learning level of students, in the classroom teaching, apart from classroom teaching, teachers should require students to read English assignments such as English biography, classical prose, and historical writings which are closely related to the western social and cultural knowledge, so that in the process of reading original English, students can understand and feel the western cultural knowledge and accumulate necessary cultural background knowledge in cross-cultural communication.

Above all, most of the Chinese and foreign language researchers think reading of foreign literature for college students' cross-cultural ability has a positive impact, such as to expand the student field of vision, to help understand the relevant language and culture background, so as to improve the cross-cultural ability. However, how to read foreign literature effectively is still the deficiency of college students.