Etiquette Issues And Humanistic Education In English Teaching: An Intercultural Perspective

With the development of globalization, more and more intercultural communications appear; so do etiquette issues caused by cultural differences. This thesis takes Chinese college English learners as its subjects, does a survey on their daily intercultural etiquette issues, and categorizes the reasons into two kinds: conscious violation and unconscious violation. Conscious violation means that some English learners believe in"do in Rome as Roman does"during the intercultural communicating process. They hold the idea that westerners in China should follow Chinese etiquette rules when they are here. Unconscious violation means that some English learners are not familiar with the target etiquette culture; they use their own etiquette rules to manipulate the whole communicating process; this is a major factor of intercultural misunderstandings on humanistic quality.Politeness theory is the base of etiquette; intercultural communication is the base of intercultural etiquette issues study. Respect is the core of politeness theory. Etiquette asks people to show the others their respect during the communicating process, and at the same time to show people their good humanistic quality. Etiquette culture in colleges shows a country's level of civilization. Humanistic education advocates general education which requires students to know more than professional skills. Therefore, in order to improve their intercultural competence and humanistic quality, college English learners need to learn etiquette knowledge during language training process, which at the same time will help them to reduce even avoid misunderstandings caused by etiquette issues. The further combination of language training and humanistic education is one of the most effective methods to improve English learners'intercultural competence.According to a survey on college English learners'daily etiquette knowledge level, this thesis proves that most college English learners have plenty of etiquette issues during intercultural communicating process, and instead of basic language skills, such as pronunciation, grammar, etc, etiquette issues are usually the main reasons of unsuccessful communications. The survey also helps to find out that westerners do expect proper etiquette from English learners; they will evaluate humanistic quality on the whole by how they behave during the communicating process. It is unassailable that etiquette knowledge is very important to language training, the improvement of humanistic quality and successful communications. Therefore, adding etiquette knowledge into language training process is not only an elemental step of language learning, but also the necessary requirement of humanistic education.