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Case Studies Of Cultural Conflicts In Chinese-American Intercultural Communication And Its Implications For Second Culture Acquisition

Posted on:2011-02-16Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:Y J HaoFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155330332961773Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
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With the development of economic globalization and frequent western and eastern intercultural communications, the world has become a global village with multi-languages, multi-cultures and multi-thinking, where people have to overcome different economic, political systems, religious beliefs, modes of thinking and values to communicate with each other. China as a country with more than 5,000 years history of ancient civilization,plays a very important role in the world nowadays.When China communicates with other countries in the world, the western and Chinese cultures with different backgrounds will come into conflicts and crashes.The economic globalization never shortens the western and Chinese communication distance. If people who do not learn the cultural differences or cope with the conflicts brought by such differences, they will encounter embarrassments, even contradictions and chaos when communicating with other cultures.For the purpose of solving such problems,the author surveys the American nationals and Chinese Americans to gather first-hand research data by recording their conversations and writing interview logs during her almost two years' study in America. Taking Greet Hofstede's mode of cultural dimensions as the classification criteria and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and "cultural schema" theories as basis, the author tries to propose solutions to solve such conflicts appearing during the Chinese-American intercultural communication process.All human activities are undertaken around five low to high hierarchies.However, different cultural schemas will affect or even reschedule the order of the hierarchy of needs. Therefore, people may encounter misunderstandings or conflicts when they communicate with others coming from a different cultural background (with different cultural schemas), even though both of them belong to the same hierarchy of needs. It also happens between people with same cultural schema but having different hierarchy of needs or different hierarchy of needs with different cultural schema carriers (different ethnic groups).At the end of the thesis, the author proposes the possible solution that is to improve the second cultural acquisition ability, construct the second cultural acquisition mode and the "cultural schema salad" by study these two different culture deeply.
Keywords/Search Tags:Cultural conflicts, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Cultural schema, Second language acquision, Cultural schema salad
PDF Full Text Request
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