Exploring Intercultural Studies In Linguistics

The accelerating pace of globalization increases the interactions between people from different cultural backgrounds.In order to avoid the failure of communication,some international researchers began to work on the study of intercultural communication research in 1950 s.However,the late start of China leads to the backward development of our research.Therefore,it is necessary for home scholars to learn about the research trends abroad and identify our gaps in order to promote our intercultural research.In the same time,the international researchers need to know more about intercultural achievements in China in order to facilitate the real globalization in this field.The present study selects articles published in some core journals in the linguistic field from 2006 to 2017 as its data,exploring the trends of home and international studies by analyzing the similarities and differences of research contents and methods and authors' affiliations.The results of research contents are acquired from corpus analysis,the research methods are classified by manual coding,based on the criteria of empirical and non-empirical research,and that of qualitative,quantitative and mixed research.Authors' affiliations are dig out through the tool of Citespace.The results reveal that: on research contents,international research is more practical,mainly focusing on the issue of identity and intercultural adaptation problem,intercultural training and actual process of translation activities.While Chinese researchers concentrate on the theoretical discussions on discipline-building or textual analysis of translation work etc..On research methods,empirical research in China has made a huge step forward in recent years although non-empirical research still surpasses empirical research by 13%.On the other hand,a great majority of international research belongs to the category of empirical research with a small amount of non-empirical research.Although qualitative research forms the mainstream tendency both in China and abroad,the international articles display a much greater preference for this research method compared with quantitative and mixed methods.As for authors' affiliations,the main forces of IC research in the linguistic field of China are from foreign language universities or foreign language departments ofcomprehensive universities,and the cooperation among universities is rare.On the contrary,there is close cooperation among universities in the international research.Comparing home studies with international studies,it is suggested that intercultural research in China should put more emphasis on practical programs in intercultural training,teaching and translation.As for research methods,Chinese scholars should be engaged in more empirical research,especially quantitative research.In addition,both domestic and international scholars should adopt more mixed approaches to achieve better reliability and validity of their research.