The Comparison Of Communicative Culture Between High And Low Context Communication

This thesis is concerned with the comparison of communicative culture between high-context and low-context communication, which is approached in such an interdisciplinary way that it involves social anthropology, sociolinguistics, social psychology, pragmatics, and communication theories. All these disciplines contribute to the study from different perspectives.The successful intercultural understanding is based on recognizing the ways in which two cultures resemble one another as well as the ways in which they differ. And culture differences are seen as the main reasons of intercultural conflicts and miscommunications. So the comparison of high-context (HC) and low-context (LC) communication will provide a basis for culture teaching and better understanding of people from other background.Since all cultures Hall (1983) labeled as low-context (LC) are individualistic while all cultures Hall labeled as high-context (HC) are collectivistic, and individualism-collectivism and versus low-context (LC)- high-context (HC) communication are broad dimensions of cultural variability that influence many different aspects of intercultural communication, the author has combined these two dimensions to compare some differences in the thesis. As far as culture teaching are concerned, the communicative culture comparison between high-context (HC) and low-context (LC) communication are very important for foreign language learners to broaden their horizon and develop communicative flexibility and tolerance.Making the distinction between HC and LC cultures will encourage us to find the similarities and differences with people from alien cultures and avoid the conflicts and miscommunications which underlie national and ethnic stereotyping. It is to go someway towards eliminating simple interpretations of other people, whose linguistic behavior is superficially different from our own, and so as to cultivate the foreign language learners' open and tolerant attitudes towards alien culture.On the basis of an examination of the cultural knowledge and demands of theEnglish learners, the author has analyzed the data statistically and made the conclusion that culture teaching lags far behind than language teaching in China. So culture teaching especially communicative culture teaching should be further strengthened in English teaching classroom.