Sino-German E-mail Communication In The Interactive Space Of Universities

With the continuous progress of globalization,the economic cooperation between countries is increasing.Meanwhile,the intercultural communication also becomes more and more frequent.Speaking of intercultural communication,one significant field is the intercultural academic communication,which happens in various forms For example,between China and Germany a variety of communication channels have been developed,such as international meeting,university cooperation,student exchange programs and visiting professor,etc.It can be foreseen that China and Germany will have more communications and interactions in the future in the interactive space of universities of these two countries.The research subject "Sino-German E-mail communication in the interactive space of universities" locates in the border area of intercultural communication studies,network communication studies and the university communication studies.So far,the intercultural communication study has still focused on face-to-face oral communication and the web-based intercultural communication has not attracted sufficient attention.On the other hand,the network communication studies and the university communication studies are carried out inside one single culture and the intercultural perspective has not been widely adopted.Therefore,at the junction of these three there lies an unexplored vacuum.The dissertation would like to fill in this research gap through the analysis of behavioral types and interactive patterns in the Sino-German e-mail communication in the university interactive space.The concept of "university interactive space" in the dissertation does not denote the physical space,such as the university campus,but the abstract space constructed through interactions between the subjects of colleges and universities.There is a variety of communication forms in the university interactive space,for example,face-to-face oral communication,telephone,SMS,or Internet-based online chat,e-mail and virtual community.Among them,due to its high efficiency,popularity and low cost,the e-mail communication becomes the dominant form of the university communication.It should be noted that university interactive space is a large and complex construction.It is impossible to include everything in this dissertation,so this dissertation only takes the Chinese students from the Intercultural Germanic Dual Master's Degree Project 2009 as research subjects and collects 239 e-mails between them and their German communicative partners in the university interactive space from October 2009 to July 2010 during their stay in Germany to study some features of the Sino-German e-mail communication in university interactive space.The first part of the dissertation is the theoretical framework.The concepts of the"culture","intercultural communication" and "space" are clarified to present an accurate theoretical definition of the "Sino-German university interactive space".In addition,it has an important guiding significance for the analysis in the dissertation to indicate e-mail communication as the major network communication.The second part introduces the analytical method.The analysis is divided into three steps:1)to recognize the behavioral type;2)to analyze the interactive pattern;3)to analyze the behavioral style.The first step is to identify the behavioral type and establish a catalog of the behavioral type of the e-mail communication in Chinese and German university interactive space;another focus in this step is to interpret the unique behavioral types and explore their influencing factors.The analysis of the interactive patterns in the second step includes the identification of the components,the construction of the process chart and the determination of the role and tasks of the interactive subjects.Finally,the behavioral style analysis focuses on the structural and communicative features of interactive patterns that are observed in the implementation process.The main body of the dissertation contains three analytical chapters,exploring the Sino-German students' e-mail communication,e-mail exchanges between Chinese students and German teachers as well as those between Chinese students and internship contacts from German companies and university management staff.The dissertation aims to explore the following four research questions:1.What behaviors may these communicative subjects have?2.What are the characteristics of these behavioral types in terms of language expression,style and structure?3.If the e-mail communication is regarded as an interactive process,then how is it carried out?4.What factors may influence the e-mail communication in the Chinese and German university interactive space?And how?With the help of the qualitative analysis software MAXQDA10,the dissertation has identified 53 behavioral types in the Sino-German students' e-mail communication and 39 behavioral types in the Sino-German e-mail Communication between teachers and students.The catalog is attached in the Appendices.Due to different communicative environments and communication partners,these behavioral types show different characteristics in terms of expressions,style and structure.For example,in the e-mail Communication between Chinese and German students,the language both sides employs is both vivid and polite.They adapt themselves to the other's culture and use many emoticons-peculiar symbols used to express their emotions in the network language.In contrast,the communicative partners in the Sino-German e-mail communication between teachers and students are also very polite and sympathetic,but obviously quite objective.There are rare emotional expressions.Furthermore,the study finds that some behavioral types are carried out differently in an intracultural communicative environment.The reason is that those behaviors are influenced by three factors simultaneously:university system,special features of the e-mail as a medium and cultural background.The summarization of these types and their intercultural interpretation may lay a foundation for further studies and promote the intercultural communications in the interactive space of universities.The analysis of the behavioral types decomposes language materials into single objects while the analysis of the interactive patterns takes the Sino-German e-mail communication in the university interactive space as a whole.The flow chart shows that the status and the cultural background of the communicative partner are evidently embodied in their interactive roles,implementation of actions and communicative styles.The final chapter of the dissertation summarizes and analyzes the principles of polite behaviors in Chinese and German cultures,which are discovered in the above analysis.Under different cultural influences,the Chinese and German interactive subjects will follow specific principles of polite behaviors in different communicative situations according to the hierarchical relationship.Therefore,although the Chinese and German principles of polite behaviors extracted from the dissertation have some guiding significance for the e-mail communication in Chinese and German university interactive space,they may not have universal applicability.In summary,the results of the analysis in the dissertation are not only the expansion of the research field of intercultural communication,but also an indirect feedback to the intercultural Germanic Dual Master's Degree Project.As mentioned above,this dissertation shows only a few features of the communication in the university interactive space.In order to gain a more complete picture,the research should cover different universities and disciplines,take different communicative channels into account and adopt different perspectives of various subjects.