A Study Of The Current Trends Of Intercultural Studies In China And Abroad

Intercultural communication rose in the United States in the 1950s. With the development of Chinese reform and opening up, in 1980s, intercultural communication was introduced into China by some domestic foreign language teaching scholars. In the 21st century, international communication is frequent, hence more scholars pay more attention to this area. In this thesis, the researcher intends to figure out the current trend of intercultural communication study at home and abroad. By comparing the study results at home and abroad, the researcher put forward her own views about future research in this area.This study adopts the method of literature review, analyzing the intercultural communication articles published in the domestic and international journals from 2006 to 2009. Domestic data are 136 articles from 10 well-known foreign languages and foreign languages teaching journals, the abroad data are 180 articles from the American authoritative intercultural communication journal International Journal of Intercultural Relations (IJIR). This study about the current trend of domestic and international intercultural communication researches is mainly analyzed from the two aspects of the research methods and research contents, resulting in a comparative study between the domestic and international intercultural studies.The research results show that, in research contents, domestic scholars are interested in the aspects of intercultural translation and pragmatics, while foreign scholars are interested in and focus on the aspects of intercultural adaptation and training. From the aspect of research methods, we can find that it is mainly non-empirical study in China, while it is empirical research abroad. Regarding the empirical research, it is mainly quantitative studies abroad, while it is mainly the mixing of qualitative and quantitative research in China.To sum up, there are distinct differences between domestic and foreign researches. In the aspect of research contents, the research on intercultural adaptation and training should be strengthened in China. While in the aspect of research methods, empirical research methods need to be emphasized. The researchers abroad may add more proportion to the mixing of quantitative and qualitative research while taking quantitative research as their main research method, to enhance the reliability and validity of the research.