Chinese Journalism Students’ Perceptions And Attitudes Towards The Intercultural Communication And Its Role In Promoting Dialogue And Mutual Understanding Between Cultures

Assuming that journalism students are likely to be future media workers and journalists, and supposing that the media workers play an important role in promoting dialogue and mutual understanding between people of different cultures, this study analyzes the perception and the attitude of the students in journalism department in two Chinese university in order to measure the degree of sensibility and competence in term of Intercultural Communication (IC) and in term of their competence to facilitate dialogue and understanding between cultures when later become active media workers in the future. By choosing one university in an urban Chinese area (Shanghai International Studies University (SISU)) and another one in an rural area (Henan University) were chosen in order to establish several comparative diagrams to illustrate the changes about the urban journalism students’attitudes and perceptions of their future intercultural role and the perceptions and attitudes of their fellows in the rural area. In addition, a comparison of the differences and changes between the attitudes and perceptions of the first year undergraduate students and the third year students of these two universities was established in order to find out whether there are changes between the intercultural perspectives of students who have been exposed to the journalism training in only one year and those who have been exposed to the journalism training for three years.The results showed that the Chinese journalism students in both rural and urban areas react positively to IC issues and have a deep respect for other cultures even thought the journalism students in urban areas are more exposed to the proper academic IC studies than their fellows in rural areas. The study also concluded that there are no much differences between perceptions and attitudes of the sophomore journalism students and those of the freshmen. Nevertheless, the journalism students in general fail to interact properly with other cultures. The research suggests that further studies should be conducted to find out reasons behind that.