| With more importance attached to intercultural competence, various approaches have been proposed. Most of the researches focus on intercultural communication failure and they explain little about the reasons behind. This thesis attempts to analyze the issue from the culture-specific perspective by introducing a relatively new concept—covert culture to identify the intrinsic reason for the failure of intercultural communication.This paper carries out a survey on three issues in terms of cultural patterns, to which the author confines covert culture in this paper: activity orientation, individualism/collectivism, and high-/low-context culture. The survey aims at investigating whether people are capable to perceive covert culture behind each intercultural communication incident and exploring the consequences for neglecting the covert culture. The whole research mainly consists of two phases: 1. questionnaire. Fourteen questions are posed to observe the students'reactions in intercultural encounters; the ratio of students who can firstly detect the deep structure of culture and whether they can differentiate covert culture from overt culture are carefully analyzed. 2. interview. The author selects eight students who have poor performance in the former study to learn how they approach each question. It tries to lay bare the content of covert culture including norm, belief, value, and social practice, all of which belong to the domain of cultural pattern. In this process, the interviewees gradually realize the differences between overt culture and covert culture through comparing the surface explanation and deep cultural structure. The author aims at improving intercultural understanding, which makes a fine foundation for more effective intercultural encounters. This paper highlights the significance of covert culture and discusses the impact of ignoring the covert culture. Besides, it helps enhance people's cultural awareness and maps out a new research agenda.
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