Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) is a complex of abilities needed to perform “effectively” and “appropriately” when interacting with others who are linguistically and culturally different from oneself (Fantini, 2006). Developing teenage learners’ ICC is essential in the era of globalization for not only facilitating communication across cultures, but also settling conflicts between different civilizations and building a community with a shared future for mankind.

      Scant attention has been paid to developing Chinese learners’ ICC in high school English classrooms although ICC should be indispensable to foreign language teaching. Based on the theoretical frameworks and empirical studies at home and abroad, this dissertation aims to examine the essential components of ICC and the assessment of ICC for high-school EFL learners in China. Four research questions guided this study:
(1) What is the framework to assess high-school EFL learners’ ICC? (2) What test to assess high-school EFL learners’ ICC? (3) What are the evidences to support the validity of score interpretation and use of the ICC test? (4) What are the results of the ICC test?

      For Research Question 1, a tentative assessment framework enlightened by the traditional Chinese philosophy of Harmony and Coexistence was proposed based on a review of relevant literature at home and abroad. After two rounds of expert judgment with the use of the Delphi method and one round of in-depth interviews with expert teachers and professionals, a final version of the assessment framework was formulated. The framework comprises three primary dimensions (i.e., affective, cognitive, and behavioral dimensions) and nine secondary sub-dimensions (i.e., a positive attitude, respect, self-confidence, the recognition of national identity, the understanding of cultural differences, the reflection of different cultures, the ability to exchange general information, the ability to convey cultural messages, and the ability to resolve dispute or misunderstandings). These nine sub-dimensions include 17 key traits.

      For Research Question 2, an internet based testing platform which simulates the real-life intercultural communication tasks and encourages the interaction between the examinees and the tasks is developed through multiple stages of planning, design, task realization, field tests, and revision. With the use of cartoon images, sounds, and scripts, the platform guides students to interact with various tasks in an immersive way and provides answers on the screen before the students complete the testing process. After several rounds of student interviews, expert review and test revision, these tasks have been proved to possess quality psychometric properties based on the analysis under the classical testing theory and the item response model.

       For Research Question 3, the Assessment Use Argument (AUA) model put forward by Bachman and Palmer (2010) was applied to develop a validation framework. Evidences from four different aspects were collected to support the score interpretation and use for 20 warrants to justify the proper use of the ICC test.

        For Research Question 4, results of the ICC test with over 400 Grade 11 students from T city revealed that: (a) the overall performance of students in the ICC test is fairly good, but the performance level in the behavioral dimension is lower than those in the affective and cognitive dimensions; (b) The performance of girls in the sub-dimensions of positive attitude and dispute settlement is significantly better than that of boys; (c) The group with high language ability performs better on ICC as a whole, but the performance of some individual students with high language ability is not necessarily high in all dimensions of ICC, which further confirms that language ability is the basis of ICC but not the most
decisive factor; (d) students’ performance levels can be classified into three types, which can be labelled as “a negative communicator”, “a passive communicator” and “a constructive communicator”.

      This study contributes to the field of ICC research in the following aspects. First, a theoretical framework based on the traditional Chinese philosophy of Harmony and Coexistence and comprised of three primary dimensions and nine sub-dimensions was developed to assess high-school EFL learners’ ICC, which filled in the gap of relevant research in
K-12 and can be further applied by foreign language teachers to guide their classroom teaching and assessment. Second, an internet based testing platform which simulates the real-life intercultural communication tasks and encourages the interaction between the examinees and the tasks was developed and innovated the assessment tools in foreign language education in K-12 in China and will be of benefit for teachers to obtain richer information on the development of
students’ ICC. Finally, this study may transform the testing process into an interesting cross-cultural learning experience with the adoption of the concept of “assessment as learning” in the process of scenario and task design, which provides a new method for teaching ICC.

      However, there are still some limitations in this research. For example, the system error caused by the convenience sampling of examinees in the stage of performance analysis may produce biased result. The quality of the assessment framework and test tasks need to be further refined and the ways to obtain students’ attitude information based on achievement test need to be further explored. The scoring procedures of constructed response tasks need to be more clearly designed, and the stability of the testing platform needs to be improved. These limitations call for future research to obtain results that are more meaningful and to provide more guidance to both teachers and students in their process of ICC teaching and learning.