The Influence Of Cultural Values On Cross-cultural Communication

This dissertation studies the influence of cultural values on cross-cultural communication. As the core of invisible culture, values are guiding principles for people's thoughts, behavior, language and communication. Cultural values are values which tend to permeate a culture. There are commonness and differences in them between cultures. During the cross-cultural communication, the commonness will make the effective communication possible, while the differences could cause negative results. As the major dimension of the differences between western and eastern values, individualism and collectivism are focused in this research. This dissertation applies both interpretive and positivist approaches to testify the two hypotheses proposed by author through questionnaire and case study. The result of the investigation indicates that with the development of economy and globalization, there are some changes in the values of individualism and collectivism in the western and Chinese subjects, but since they have been affected by their history and traditional cultures for such a long time that this change is not significant. The mainstream is still the difference, which proves the author's first hypothesis. Second, the cases studies suggest that during the cross-cultural communication, due to the inseparable relationship among culture, value and language communication, the differences will reflect in the language and communicative intentions. However, sometimes, because communicators are not familiar with the cultural values of the other party, they couldn't understand others well, which may result in the negative influences as confusions, misunderstandings and pragmatic failure in cross-cultural communications. This proves the author's second hypothesis. This dissertation implies that in foreign language learning, linguistic proficiency does not necessarily mean cross-cultural communicative competence. Language learning should combine with cultural learning. In addition, communicators should cultivate themselves an awareness and sensitivity for cultural values in cross-cultural communication.