A Study Of Nonverbal Behaviors In Cross-cultural Communication

With the rapid development of globalization, there have been more frequent communications and contacts among different countries and cultures. Hence, it is imperative for us to study how to better communicate with people from different cultures.Generally speaking, there are two ways of human communication: one is verbal communication, which is carried out by verbal behaviors; the other is nonverbal communication, which is fulfilled by nonverbal behaviors . We are fully aware of the importance of verbal communication and there have been many related researches as well as publications. However, we neglect nonverbal communication consciously or uncouciously. Actually, nonverbal communication is as important as verbal communication, and even in some aspect it is of greater significance. American anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell did a research to estimate the quantity of verbal behaviors and nonverbal behaviors in communication in the same culture. The result, to our surprise, showed that nonverbal behaviors contribute 70% to our communication, while verbal behaviors just take up 30%,, from which we can clearly see the importance of nonverbal communication.The study of nonverbal communication began with the isolated studies of voice, appearance, facial expressions during the first half of the twentieth century, till now it has had systematical studies on chronemics, proxemics, body language, object language, environmental language and paralanguage, etc. We can see that the study of nonverbal communication has had a comprehensive and scientific system, it has also drawn great attention of many researchers such as anthropologists, psychologists, cross-cultural communication researchers and language teachers, and it has got a delightful achievement. However, we still have to admit that compared with verbal communication study, the nonverbal communication study is far from enough, especially the study of cross-cultural nonverbal communication. Thus, this thesis will focus on the study of nonverbal behaviors in cross-cultural communication. This thesis is divided into six chapters, which introduces the historical perspective, categories and expressions of nonverbal behaviors, and elaborates some typical cases caused by misunderstanding nonverbal behaviors. At the end of the thesis it puts forward some suggestions to improve our nonverbal communicative competence. The purpose of this paper is to call for people to pay more attention to nonverbal behaviors, and to try to avoid those misunderstandings and conflicts, so as to improve our cross-cultural communication skills.