A Study On Cross-cultural Nonverbal Communication And Its Teaching

With the development of globalization and information revolution, communicationbetween people from different countries and cultures increases, and cross-culturalcommunication has become one of the most important characteristics in the world.There are two ways of communication: one is verbal communication and the other isnonverbal communication. Verbal communication is common and its importance has beenuniversally acknowledged. Many learners and experts have been researching in verbalcommunication at length. While nonverbal communication, on the contrary, is still ignored tosome extent. Verbal communication is paid great attention to because of its obviousness andclearness. People think that words are the sole carrier of information, so that they ignore thefact that nonverbal communication carries information, too. People pay attentions to theirspeech but ignore that body language, paralanguage or object languages carry more “silent”information. Nonverbal communication is an indispensable part of communication. AsSamovar suggested,“most learners agree that in face-to-face communication, informationcarried by verbal communicational behavior accounts for only35%of all that incommunication, and the rest information is conveyed by nonverbal communicationalbehavior.” The misunderstanding of cultural differences and culture shock of nonverbalcommunication usually affects cross-culture communication.This thesis analyzes body language, paralanguage, object language, environmentallanguage and compares the cultural differences of them from the perspective of cross-culturalcommunication, and reveals the cause of culture shock. Meanwhile, nonverbalcommunication is leaned, so it ought to be a part of foreign language teaching. Or foreignlanguage teaching is not complete and successful. Therefore, this thesis probes intocross-cultural communication at school and cross-culture nonverbal communication teaching.This thesis is comprised of five chapters. Chapter one is introduction, stating the aim andmeaning of the research, summarizing research method, characteristic and conclusion of thisthesis. Chapter two includes the definition of nonverbal communication, literature review, andthe relationship between nonverbal communication and verbal communication. Chapter threeintroduces the relationship between culture and cross-cultural nonverbal communication, andthe function of nonverbal communication in cross-cultural communication. Chapter fouremphasize on analysis of the detailed categories of nonverbal communication and thecharacteristics of each category. Possible culture shock resulted from Chinese-Englishnonverbal communication is also included in chapter four. In chapter five, the thesis discussesnonverbal communication at school, the different types of nonverbal communication at school, and the characteristics of nonverbal communication between teachers and students, andculture shocks caused by nonverbal communication at school in cross-culture communication.Another important part of chapter five is the content, method and measures of nonverbalcommunication teaching.