A Cross-cultural Study of Daily Communication between Chinese and American-- From the Perspective of High Context and Low Context

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.