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12 Teaching Intercultural Communication in a Chinese Perspective Shen Zhaohua Introduction In the year 1978, China began to open its doors to the outside world. China seeks contact with foreign countries at every level — cultural, economic and political — through language. More and more people find that successful contact with foreigners involves not only a person’s linguistic competence (Chomsky 1965) but also intercultural competence (Wiemann 1993; Buttjes and Byram 1990). Chinese students will live and work in an increasingly multicultural world in which they will need increasingly sophisticated cultural skills. So, the goal of intercultural competence for language teaching in China should focus on developing learners’ competence in the context of intercultural communication and preparing them to perform verbally in culturally appropriate ways in the target language (Xu 2000). However, at present, one of the main problems with teaching English in a Chinese tertiary setting is that priority is always given to learning the internal structure of language: grammatical rules, phonological regulation, set phrases, idiomatic usage and the like. The ability to choose available communication skills to successfully accomplish interpersonal goals in intercultural communication (Wiemann 1993) is neglected. Chinese students easily fall into the trap of assuming that they are learning a new language rather than an entirely new way of communication. As students study grammar rules and vocabulary, and practice translating their thoughts into English sentences, there is a strong tendency for them to focus on the language itself and to assume that using English is primarily a process of learning to correctly translate English sentences into Chinese and vice versa. In many ways, it almost seems as if Chinese students think they are learning a new set of sounds and words to be used for communicating with other Chinese people. 188 Shen Zhaohua Of course I am overstating the position somewhat. Chinese students obviously know that there are cultural differences between them and native English speakers, and that they need to take these differences into consideration when deciding what to say and what not to say. One often gets the impression from Chinese students that they think that, if they learn a few rules of polite Western behavior, they should be able to solve most communication problems with native English speakers quite satisfactorily. What this assumption overlooks is the fact there is a degree of ambiguity inherent in all language use, and understanding a message always requires a degree of interpretation (Scollon and Scollon 2000). Students too rarely recognize that virtually every real-life situation which requires them to use English will involve intercultural communication and that learning to communicate effectively with people of radically different cultural backgrounds involves learning not only language itself but also the cultural rules governing the target language (Crozet 1996). Problems in intercultural communication In China, it is not a rare phenomenon that a few EFL learners make great progress in language courses through hard work. Some are even able to outperform native English speakers in certain proficiency tests such as TOEFL and GRE. However, when they are engaged in real contact with native English speakers, they can neither express themselves appropriately nor understand the genuine meanings of their interlocutor(s). In most cases, mutual misunderstandings take place, causing confusion and frustration for all concerned. Some of the reasons for this are obvious. Participants will generally not share the same background knowledge and will have different assumptions and beliefs, hence increasing the chances that one participant will be unable to follow what the other is talking about, and they evaluate words and actions differently (Shen 1999). In this chapter, I limit discussion of intercultural communication to those situations involving face-to-face encounters between ESL/EFL students and native English speakers. The following case, “the privacy of price,” came from Dai Fan and Stephen Smith (2003), who work with Chinese students studying in North America and strive to help them understand the sometimes strange culture in which they find themselves. After living in the United States for some time, Ping Li, a Ph.D. student, observed that Americans like to comment on each other’s looks and clothes. So, when she saw a fellow American graduate student wearing a nice dress at a party, she complimented her by saying, “This is a very beautiful dress.” “Oh, thank you. I bought it last year before Christmas.” The American student was very pleased. “How much was it?” Ping Li asked. “Well, I don’t quite remember.” The American student seemed unprepared for the question, and...

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