Psychological Factors In Intercultural Communication

As a new marginal discipline, intercultural communication became an important separate discipline in the 1970s. It emerged in America and has been developing quickly and greatly in the western world. We know that America is a country of immigrants and is called the "melting pot", which provides unique background for the research of intercultural communication. Many famous universities in America also grant Ph.D. degrees in the field of intercultural communication. While in China, since the discipline was first introduced in the 1980s, now many monographs and thesis are being published and more and more professors and scholars are coming into the research of intercultural communication.In this essay, the writer first introduces the definition of language and culture, and also talks about their close relationship in the first chapter and also gives the readers a glimpse of the development of intercultural communication both in China and in America.The second chapter dwells on the cultural differences in the process of intercultural communication from three important levels—semantic level, pragmatic level and cognitive level. The writer tries to probe into the close relationship between language and culture. Language is a reflection of culture. It is impossible to separate our use of language from our culture.The third chapter talks about the psychological factors in the process of communication between cultures, which are also the psychological explanations for the cultural differences to some degree. This chapter is the key chapter of the thesis and explains the main psychological factors in intercultural communication and the latest developments of them: such as: stereotyping, values, the Sapir-Wholf's hypothesis, ethnocentrism, culture shock and prejudice. The thesis points out that the psychological factors are very important to the successful intercultural communication. Only by knowing about those psychological factors, can we truly master the core of cultural differences and make our process of intercultural communication effective.The last chapter tells us how to teach intercultural communication and what should be the appropriate role of the language teacher and language learner. Nowadays more and...