Cultural Conflict And Bridging - Cultural Conflict In Cross-cultural Communication Research

Culture shock is a phenomenon arising from cross-cultural communication. It happens when different cultures clash with each other. The term, culture shock described the anxiety produced when a person moves to a completely new environment. In fact, cross-cultural adjustment should be considered a continuumwith at least two periods-entry to another culture and reentry to one's homeculture. In this thesis, the author will introduce the basic concepts used in the study of cross-cultural pragmatic failure, make a brief review of past studies in this area, and use pragmatic theories to analyze some examples of pragmatic failures occurred in cross-cultural communication. Finally the author will come up with some suggestions on how to avoid pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication. This paper was divided into five parts. The first part was instruction. The second discussed the details in the process of cross-cultural communication. For example, the different ethics' standpoints, the different communicating model, and etc. The third part provided the policies to solve culture shock, Such as, cultivating the capacities in communication field. Then, finally it is a conclusion. All in all, one has to be both grammatically competent and pragmatically competent to communicate with others in a foreign language. To cultivate one's communicative competence, one must first develop a sense of cross-cultural awareness. One has to respect other cultures in order to learn them. Besides cross-cultural awareness, knowledge of the target language's pragmatic principles will be beneficial in developing one's communicative competence.