New Understanding Of China's Cross-cultural Communication

The 21st century is characteristically intercultural communication. According to the basic concept of the intercultural communication research, the interaction of people from divergent cultural background is a quite complicated process. During communication, their differences in cognitive behaviors, values and ways of thinking will result in different understanding of the same matter. Ignorance of the divergence will surely cause the failure of communication. In the past two decades, our booming research in the intercultural communication has scored a great many achievements, which have not only opened up the new world for the linguistic studies, but have also brought fresh impetus to the teaching and research of foreign language. By reviewing the status of our intercultural communication research, this thesis attempts, from a new perspective, to reveal some existing problems in this field, in addition to affirming its fruitful results. The nature of culture is the source of the discussion. In accordance with the contemporary dynamic Chinese cultural characteristics and the changes in the Chinese interpersonal communication, the thesis offers a few constructive observations about our future intercultural communication research in terms of the real communication situation, conducive to inspire the foreign Chinese education. The thesis consists of five chapters, besides foreword and epilogue.Chapter 1 introduces the history of intercultural communication research, depicting its origination, development and accomplishment.Chapter 2 reviews the development of our intercultural communication research over the last two decades. After consulting masterpieces and papers of the intercultural communication studies of the last decade, the author tracks down the deviated trends and the potential obstacles of the intercultural communication research.Chapter 3 describes, with the purpose to locate the source of the problems, the various aspects of intercultural communication in new approaches, focusing on new perceptions to the nature of culture, apart from proposing that values, as the core of culture, integrate and transform with culture.Chapter 4 analyzes the changes of values since China's reform and opening up, which, in turn, bring about the changes in ways of communication.Chapter 5 argues that the sound development of the intercultural communication research requires us to properly address the existing problems. In particular, the selection of the cultural content should conform, to the most extent, to the changed circumstances, instead of being shackled by the traditional, rigid and stereotyped theories.In conclusion, the thesis derives a few inspirations for foreign Chinese teaching from the suggestions to and prospects of the intercultural communication discussed in the preceding chapters, based on the example that the excessive sensitivity to intercultural communication may, instead, give rise to the failure in communication in reality.