The School of Liberal Arts held the open class “Culture and Verbal Communication”of the school-level first-class course “Intercultural Communication”successfully in Room 702 of Sanjiang Building in the third and fourth class of March 13, 2023. This open class was taught by Ms. Dai Wenjing from the Department of teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages, and the target audience was Chinese and foreign students majoring in teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages in the grade of 2021.
Adopting the innovative methods of online and offline mixing teaching as well as bilingual apprach, Ms. Dai made good use of the latest global theoretical resources to help students understand the cultural differences and their impacts of different verbal communication styles through theoretical introduction and case analysis. It focuses on a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of high and low context cultures from theory to application. Through the lecture, students not only have a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the characteristics of high and low cultural communication from the theoretical level, but also know how to properly apply the theory into practice to improve their intercultural communication skills.
Ms Dai’s open class mainly covered four aspects: Firstly, she started from the theory of “rectification of names” proposed by Confucius, to the philosopher Whitehead, the founder of Western process philosophy, who pointed out the “limitations of verbal communication”. When illustrated the relationship between culture and language from the perspective of bridging East and West, she introduced the topic of the course, i.e., “culture and verbal communication”. Secondly, she introduced the Edward T. Hall’s , the father of intercultural communication, and the key points of his classic works, such as The Silent Language(1959) ,The Hidden Dimension(1966) and Beyond Culture(1976) to further deepen each theoretical knowledge points through the detailed explanation of micro-videos. Thirdly, she adopted a combined method of theory and case analysis to help students analyze the underlying causes of intercultural communication mistakes from a more rational perspective, and how to avoid these mistakes in future intercultural communication to improve their own intercultural communication skills. Finally, in order to enhance the students’ ability to disseminate the excellent Chinese culture, Ms. Dai took the military strategist’s scripture “Sun-Tzu: The Art of War” as an example, analyzed its important position in the history of cultural exchange between China and foreign countries, and explained the translations of its core ideas. The teaching content with in-depth explanations is interlinked with rigorous and clear logic, the theory is integrated with practice, and the lecture and practice is combined perfectly. The students actively followed Ms. Dai’s teaching thoughts with serious concentration. Teacher and students have many interactions, and the whole class was full of active atmosphere and lively discussion. The overall teaching effect is very good.
