| Since the beginning of 21st century, high and information technologies have shown their magic power in shrinking the world. People on the earth, no matter where they live, what languages they speak and what their skin colors are, are now having more and more opportunities to communicate with each other, doing business, making friends and solving problems. But the reduction of physical distance cannot make sure that the distance between the souls is getting closer. Most of the time, people of different cultural backgrounds, though speaking the same language, cannot exchange ideas smoothly and happily for the lack of necessary knowledge in intercultural communication.One of the biggest differences between China and the western world lies in the cultural differences in the use of context in communication. According to E. T. Hall in his book Beyond Culture (1976), communication can be divided into two kinds from the angle of context. The communication with the main reliance on context is called high-context communication, while the communication relying mostly on language is called low-context communication. The two kinds of communication exist in all cultures, but there does lie a preference of a communication style in the longtime social development. Therefore, accordingly, there have developed two kinds of cultures in terms of context differences. They are high-context and low-context cultures, which is also put forward by Hall in his book Beyond Cultures in 1976.This thesis is developed on Hall's theory of high-context and low-context cultures, mainly dwelling on the comparison of communication styles between high-context and low-context cultures with China and the U.S. as the representatives respectively. After giving a brief background introduction and a literature review in the first two chapters, the author makes an analysis in Chapter 3 on the divergences of communication styles in the use of context, based on their different understandings of the nature of communication. The communication style in China is mainly characterized by indirectness, implicitness, formality and collective initiative, whereas the communication style in the U.S. is featured by directness, explicitness, informality and individual initiative. Then the author points out the influencing factors in the development of the contextual differences, including social and historical factors, religious and philosophical factors and the influencing of internal cognitive process. In Chapter 4, in order to deepen readers'understanding of the divergences between high-context and low- context cultures, the author gives a detailed case study on miscommunication in the Sino-U.S. intercultural communication. Then in Chapter 5, the author discusses the issue of how to apply the above study in cultural teaching classes. The author first points out the significance of the awareness of the contextual differences in intercultural communication with the help of two surveys. One was conducted by Hu Wenzhong to see the views of both teachers and students on questions related to awareness of cultural traits. Using it as a model, the author did another survey on the current condition of English Major Students'awareness of the differences between high-context and low-context cultures. Both surveys indicate that English major students'awareness of the contextual differences needs improving pressingly in order to have successful intercultural communication between high-context and low-context cultures. Based on the above, the author suggests using videos as a teaching technique in the enhancement of students'awareness of the contextual divergences in classrooms with the explanation of the advantages, the general principles and samples of its implementation. In Chapter 6, the author gives a conclusion and points out the limitation of the thesis. |
