A Comparative Study Of Chinese And American Body Language From The Perspective Of Cultural Relativism

With the rapid development of society and the globalization of the economy, people have more opportunities to communicate with people from different cultures. Cross-cultural communication has become an important part of human communicative activities.Two basic means of communication are used, one is verbal communication and the other is nonverbal communication. People usually have a tendency to stress the verbal aspect of communication while the nonverbal means of communication are ignored. Nonverbal communication plays an important role in human communication. Many researchers think that in a face-to-face interaction about 35 percent of meaning of information is performed through words while the other information is conveyed through nonverbal means.In the process of human communication, people use body language as well as verbal language to communicate. Body language is also called kinesics which belongs to the aspect of nonverbal communication. Body language plays an important role in utterance meaning such as supplement, accenting, expression, symbol or substitute.Body language belong to a part of culture. It is unavoidable to have body language misunderstanding since body language has different meanings in different culture background The study of body language can help us communicate with others successfully, so it is necessary for us to master body language of different cultures.This thesis intends to explore the cultural differences in body language between Chinese and Americans from the perspective of cultural relativism and gives specific examples of body language differences between Chinese and Americans ranging from gestures, postures, facial expressions and eye contacts. This thesis will also further discuss the major dimensions of cultural variability, which are power distance, high-vs.-low contact culture, masculine culture vs. feminine culture and so on. Through comparative study of body languages between two culture can help us understand the culture between two country in order to reach the aim of communication effectively and successfully. The thesis will also give some help and implication for foreign language teaching. .