Research on Fostering Intercultural Communication Competence of Chinese EFL Learners in Online Learning Using Machine Learning Method

In the context of Chinese culture going global and the increasing important role of China on the global stage, intercultural communication competence plays an increasingly important role in terms of personal, national and international communication. This paper provides an investigation on ICC, online learning and the integration of ICC development into online learning. This study proposes three ways on the integration of ICC cultivation into online curriculum, including creating online community, constructing real-life situations, and combining technology with online learning. This study also addresses the problem of assessing and improving ICC in online learning contexts by leveraging machine learning (ML)-based sentiment analysis. The key idea of our research study is to integrate ML-based sentiment analysis into the evaluation of students’ intercultural communication skills during online courses. The proposed model's performance is assessed using various metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and AUC. The results of the experiments designates that the Random Forest algorithm outperforms other ML models. This research has a capacity enhance the understanding of students’ intercultural communication experiences and provide actionable insights for instructors.