A Comparative Study Of Power Distance Between Chinese And Foreign English Teachers In Chinese Classroom Communication

Cultural value is the core in language use, while language use is the carrier of cultural value. Cultural value is formed into a certain type via language spreading. In a certain degree, language is not only the carrier, but also the approach to deal with problems in shaping people’s cultural value and determines people’s conception in communication and connection in daily life. Dutch social psychologist Hofstede put forward the cultural dimensions and verified that differences exist among different culture backgrounds. English is a language learnt by Chinese students for such a long time. In terms of different cultural and educational backgrounds for college English teachers in China, is there any difference in cultural values reflected in the classroom communication?To dig out the answers, two comparable groups, namely college Chinese English teachers and foreign English teachers, are selected for the research. Due to the limitations of research time, we merely selected teachers from universities in Wuhan. For foreign English teachers whose mother tongue is English, they have received western culture education and have been deeply involved in western cultural value. For Chinese English teachers, who acquired English for such a long time, have reserved the Chinese traditional cultural value and domestic characteristic in classroom interaction and communication. Therefore, the above two research questions can be answered by comparing differences in cultural values and classroom communication strategies between Chinese English teachers and foreign English teachers.Among these culture dimensions, this research focuses on ‘power distance dimension’ proposed by Dutch social psychologist Hoftede. He defined power distance as the acceptance degree of the less powerful social members towards power inequality in one social group or organization. According to Hofstede, in high power distance environment, teacher initiates all the classroom activities and thus is the center of the class. While in low power distance, teachers treat students more equally and classroom interaction is based on the equal communication.Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used in this research. Classroom observation and questionnaire survey were used and further observe the details in verbal and non-verbal behaviors. In verbal communication, it mainly studied the aspects of classroom verbal quantity, greeting, questioning, and feedback. In non-verbal aspect, body language, gestures and tone are the main points that the author observed to analyze the influences that culture differences have brought about.Statistics analyses show that power distance of foreign English teachers who are influenced by western culture is much lower than that of Chinese English teachers in classroom communication. At last, the author concluded that cultural values and communication approaches are the factors that caused power distance differences. It is hoped that Chinese college English teachers should break the traditional boundaries, analyze the teaching strategies objectively, integrate the western culture environment for a lower power distance between teachers and students, adjust classroom communicative skills and improve the mode of teaching methods in order to create a favorable English language teaching environment.