Study Of Chinese Students' Observational Perspectives On English Speaking Countries

The main purpose of teaching English language is for that the students can communicate with people from English speaking countries. Apart from the knowledge of grammar and vocabulary about English language, the ability of intercultural communication is of great importance. One of the main difficulties for effective intercultural communication is that they tend to use their own perspective to interpret the behaviors of other cultures, and the more the students tend to use their own perspective to observe other cultures, the more ethnocentric they are, that is to say, it is more difficult for them understand the behaviors of people from other cultures. Chinese students can be divided into different co-cultures according to their background, age, gender and so on. Each co-culture has its own characteristics, which determines that their communication with others will be different to some degree. The purpose of the study is examining how the characteristics which divide the Chinese students into different co-cultures affect their degree of ethnocentrism. The data are collected through questionnaires which take the form of likert scale. The scores of each questionnaire show their degree of ethnocentrism. The data from the study are to answer the following research question: what are the differences in the degree of ethnocentrism between different groups of Chinese students who are divided by age, gender, and the fact that whether they have frequent contact with people from English speaking countries, whether they have received formal education about the culture of English speaking countries. In the data analysis process, T-test is used to find out whether the differences of the mean scores are significant.There are five results: (a) students who have frequent contact with people from English speaking countries are far less ethnocentric than those who are not, (b) students who are older in age are much more likely to use the perspective of culture relativism, (c) female students are most likely to be ethnocentric, (d) students who have received formal education on culture of English speaking countries have higher degree of cultural relativism (e) In colleges, students of arts'degree of culture relativism is higher than those of science and they tend to use the perspective of cultural relativism.