A Brief Survey Of Cross-cultural Communication: Communicate At The Third Place

With the development of the technology and society the whole world is regarded as a "global village". The chance of cross-cultural communication between different countries and different nations becomes more than ever before. The conflicts between each language, culture which the language carries, and the varied views of value cause much misunderstanding. All these are the courses and problems for the study of cross-cultural communication would probe into.Kramsch and the other researchers, who have deep study of this field, have brought out the "Third Place" theory. It regards the mother language as the "First Place", the target language the "Second Place", and the "Place" that between the mother language and the target language the "Third Place". It believed that the cross-cultural communication lies in the learner's understanding of the target language which is called the "Third Place". With this notion, Kramsch's study focuses on the authenticity and the variation of the target language. It provides an acceptable process of foreign language learning.This paper consists six chapters. Chapter I states the importance of the cross-cultural communication. Chapter II describes Kramsch's "Third Place" theory, and lists the other famous theories of this field. Chapter III analyses the difference of the cultural difference between Westerners and Easterners. Chapter IV focus on the "Third Place". The following chapter is the most important one in this paper. The author designed questions and analyzed the feedback. The detailed statistics in the tables showed the problems existing in today's cross-cultural communication. The freshman, sophomore, junior, senior of the college and the employees of the foreign trade are chosen as the representatives to accomplish the samples. The last chapter elaborates the results in the investigation and finds out the problems to analyze, and by the knowledge of various books and papers this author have read and some working experience, some suggestions are given to deal with the foreign language teaching and learning in college.