A Cross-Cultural Study Of Body Language Use In EFL Learning Of Chinese College Students

The thesis is intended as a tentative study of body language use in EFL learning of Chinese college students. It integrates previous studies of body language with EFL learning in China with a view to improving the learners'cross-cultural communicative competence.In face-to-face communication the majority of the information is conveyed through nonverbal behaviors. People's employment of body language is subconscious, learned and culture-bounded. In order to prove this, the author designs a questionnaire and a test to examine body language use in EFL learning of Chinese college students. The result of the study reveals not only a low level of understanding of English nonverbal behavior among Chinese EFL learners, but also a high degree of culture-dependency of the subject matter and the complexity of face-to-face cross-cultural interactions. The qualitative analysis identifies the specific kinds of difficulty for Chinese learners and shows that false decoding is a common phenomenon that can pose serious problems to communication. It is evident that successful English learning involves not only a high level of language proficiency but also a good command of the system of nonverbal behavior in the target speech community.Based on the result of the study, the thesis gives some feasible suggestions on improving Chinese EFL learners'cultural awareness and cross-cultural communicative competence. It is hoped that the present study will benefit both EFL learners and teachers.