Misunderstanding in communication is universal and inevitable. This study explores the causes of misunderstanding from cultural perspective and the process of moving from misunderstanding to understanding between Americans and Chinese. Through one and half a years’ investigation into the experience of 20 American learners of advanced Chinese interacting with Chinese people in Chinese language in both China and the U.S., more than 500 cases of misunderstanding were collected from observations, interviews, participants’ cultural journals and personal blogs and about 40 typical cases were selected for further analysis in this study.
This study examines how cultural differences influence individual’s interpretations of the five basic elements in communication: roles, time, place, scripts and audience. Failing to recognize the hidden discrepancies in these elements and behaving based on one’s base cultural assumptions in the target culture is the root cause of misunderstandings. When communication is considered as selecting the stories that we know and telling them to others at the right time, misunderstanding usually means applying a story retrieved from one’s native culture to people from another culture without realizing that the story has different meanings in different cultures.
This study also illustrates the ongoing dynamic process from misunderstanding to understanding. A given misunderstanding is actually a previous understanding on a continuum and an incomplete understanding at any certain point on that continuum. Reaching understanding is a spiral process through misunderstandings which reveals the problems or difficulties that are usually covered up by specious understandings and inspires communicators to come to a better level of understanding. The process from misunderstanding to understanding in cross-cultural communication can be accelerated through acute observation, greater second-culture awareness and an action-oriented outlook.
Based on the research findings, this study recommends that Chinese language programs in the United States adopt an intention-oriented pedagogical outlook which takes the mastery of intention of communication rather than the production of linguistic items as the ultimate goal of learning a foreign language. This new pedagogical outlook distinguishes itself in the following four significant features:
1) It is culture-centered rather than language-centered;
2) It is performance-centered rather than grammar-centered;
3) It is student-centered rather than teacher-centered;
4) It is target-culture centered rather than native-culture-centered.
Only by so doing do foreign language learners truly become the bridges for cross-cultural communication.