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Cross Cultural Differences

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Submitted By deniko
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Asian Social Science

October, 2008

A Cross-cultural Study of Daily Communication between Chinese and American -- From the Perspective of High Context and Low Context
Jianeng Wang Foreign Languages College, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou 310018, China E-mail: jianeng101@163.com Abstract In cross-cultural communication, ignorance of contexts usually leads to misunderstanding and conflicts. Based on Edward. T. Hall’s notion of high-context and low-context, this paper aims to generalize the basic distinctive characteristics of the two contexts by analyzing the actual cases in daily communication between American and Chinese. This paper also tries to conclude some tips for communication crossing the two contexts in accordance with the case analysis. Keywords: High-context, Low-context, Communicatio, Culture 1. About Hall’s high-context and low-context Context is important in all communication, but it is relatively more important in some situations than in others. There are also significant differences across cultures in the ways and the extent to which people communicate through context. One of the main distinctions between cultures has been the notion of high and low context cultures, proposed by the American anthropologies Edward. T. Hall in his 1976 classic, Beyond Culture (Hall, 2000). 1.1 What is high/low-context? Edward T. Hall has described cultural differences in the use of language and context in communication. He calls communication that occurs mostly through language low context and communication that occurs in ways other than though languages as high context. A high-context (HC) communication or message is one in which most of the information is either in the physical context or internalized in the person, while very little is either in the physical context or internalized in the person, while very little is in the coded, explicit, transmitted

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