Stereotype In Intercultural Communication And Its Implications For ESL Teaching

Stereotype is an inevitable phenomenon in intercultural communication.Ingformation revolution makes us understand and communicate with different cultures and groups in an unprecedented way. Mutual understanding, respects and cooperation between different cultures and group have become particularly important. As a main carrier of culture, language is a central embodiment of human culture. However, cultural differences of different countries and peoples may lead to cultural stereotype. Stereotype is the oversimplified categorization to an individual or a group. Stereotype is one of the aspects which influence effective intercultural communication. It helps people understand different cultures and sets up a barrier which hinders communication among people from different cultures at the same time. Culture teaching is an inevitable trend of English teaching in cultural teaching, so it involves cultural stereotype. In a sense, foreign language study is a process of cultural study. One of the goals of the foreign language teaching is to foster the students'cultural consciousness and improve their intercultural communicative competence.From the perspective of intercultural communication, this thesis discusses and analyses Dalian college students'stereotypes on Americans and American culture. After briefly literature reviews of the domestic and foreign research, author designs a survey on stereotype by using the methods of questionnaire and interview in order to explore the effective way to help college students develop accurate stereotype. 180 non-English-major students were selected as the subjects of this research. The research is mainly to study whether students have formed stereotypes of target culture and to analyze the sources of cultural stereotype and its impacts on intercultural communication. The author attempts to find more reasonable teaching methods through the research and make students form more objective and accurate stereotypes to improve the students'intercultural communication competence.There are five chapters. Chapter one is introduction. The definitions of culture, intercultural communication and stereotypes are introduced. This chapter also gives reader the research purpose and research questions. Chapter two is literature review. This chapter introduces the characteristics, process of formation, causes, and influences of stereotype on intercultural communication. It also summarizes the study on stereotype both abroad and in China and their differences. Four research measures of stereotype are introduced. Chapter Three describes research design, research methods and data collection procedure. Chapter four analyzes the data and discusses the result. Chapter Four is about the data of research is analyzed with discussion. Chapter Five is the conclusion of this thesis. The findings and limitation are point out. The implications of stereotype for ESL teaching and learning are discussed.