A Comparative Study Of Chinese And American Body Language From The Perspective Of Cross-Cultural Communication

Nonverbal communication is usually neglected in interpersonal communications.But as a matter of fact, nonverbal behaviors and language factors are two sides of communication, which are mutually dependent. A large quantity of failure cases in cross-cultural communication indicate that body language, as an important part of nonverbal communication, plays a significant role in human communication. Body language is of great importance in the communication of people who have different cultural background. It helps support and promote the success of a cross-cultural communication. Influenced by Chinese and American cultures, body language in China and America has some similarities as well as some differences.Body language is an important topic that is worth studying in the field of cross-cultural communication, it is certain nonverbal element including eye contact,facial expression, gesture, etc. This thesis aims to make a tentative comparative analysis of Chinese and American body language from the perspective of cross-cultural communication, combining relevant theories of culture and on the basis of two corresponding Chinese and American situation comedies. The author chooses the first 20 episodes of the first season as the research cases respectively from the American sitcom Modern Family and the Chinese sitcom Home with Kids. Taking the body language in the two sitcoms as research objects, the author adopts the quantitative and qualitative analysis methods as well as the comparative analysis to make a large number of statistics and overall observation, so as to draw some conclusions at last.Body language bears abundant cultural connotations, and there are big differences between Chinese and American body language when it comes to parents’ dealing with children’s issues. When parents give kids a lesson, American parents tend to take a standing posture to show their stateliness, while Chinese parents tend to take a sitting posture to tell kids to show respect for seniority. The author considers that body language has three features, namely, historical heritage, universality andparticularity. Through further studying the body language from the perspective of cross-cultural communication, we can minimize some unnecessary misunderstandings on both Chinese and American sides, thus facilitating the smoothness, appropriateness,effectiveness and pleasantness of a cross-cultural communication.