Negative Cultural Transfer In Sino-American Temporal Communication

Negative cultural transfer occurs in all processes of intercultural communication and in foreign language learning. It refers to the cultural interference caused by cultural differences, which shows that people subconsciously use their own cultural norms and values not only to guide their behaviors and thoughts but also to evaluate other people' s behaviors and thoughts. It often results in misunderstandings, communicative failure, and even hatred.Negative cultural transfer can be divided into two layers: the negative transfer of surface-structure culture and the negative transfer of deep-structure culture. The present paper focuses on the study of the negative transfer of deep-structure culture in Sino-American temporal communication, and the negative transfer of surface-structure culture is also mentioned in passing. In one culture, some deep cultural elements including beliefs, values and thought patterns have the most significant influence on the shaping of people's temporal perceptions and on their temporal behaviors. The differences in these deep cultural elements between China and America lead to the differences in temporal perceptions and temporal behaviors between the Chinese and Americans. In Sino-American communication, the Chinese subconsciously tend to use their own temporal perceptions to guide their temporal behaviors, and moreover, they also treat the Americans' temporal behaviors according to their own perceptions, which often results in the occurrence of negative cultural transfer and then misunderstandings and ineffective communication arise. Americans. The study in the present paper on thirty Chinese students and thirty American students studying in Beijing reveals that negative cultural transfer phenomena do exist in Sino-American temporal communication and affects intercultural communication.Some suggestions on how to reduce the occurrence of negative cultural transfer in temporalcommunication are provided in the present paper, such as learning cultural knowledge both in the target culture and in the native culture, reinforcing cultural empathy, and constructing multitemporal perceptions.