Intercultural Nonverbal Communication Between The Group Of Disabled Co-Culture And The Group Of Dominant Nondisabled Culture In China

Intercultural communication researches have achieved great development in the recent 20 or 30 years. The contents of the research have already gone beyond the mainstream cultures and the research on the minor cultural groups, co-cultural groups, gradually becomes a new focus within the discipline. In the midst, the study on the disabled co-culture is a typical example. In the west, works on the disabled co-culture have already been published; however, in China, that area does not attract enough attention from the scholars. Therefore, this study, going from the perspective of the disabled co-culture, mainly discusses the intercultural nonverbal communication between the group of the disabled co-culture and the group of dominant nondisabled culture. Information needed is collected through questionnaires and face-to-face interviews with both the disabled and the nondisabled persons. With an interpretive analysis method, the influence of typical nonverbal behaviors to the face-to-face intercultural communication such as physical appearance, eye contact and interpersonal distance etc. between the group of disabled and nondisabled persons are found out, based on which communication strategies to both groups are proposed. The purpose is to improve the intercultural communication between the disabled and nondisabled persons.