01白潞潞 毕业论文.docVIP

1. Introduction With the development of politics, economics and scientific technology, the world is quite different from before. The earth, where the human beings are living in, seems take shrinking. Today, trips once taking years, months, weeks, and then days are now measured in a matter of hours. In effect, the planet earth is not shrinking, but time and space is. In the global village, nations are like families and countries are like neighborhoods. Time and space no longer isolate or protect nations and groups from each other. It naturally follows that intercultural contact has become more frequent, direct and, therefore, more significant than ever before. When people of different cultural backgrounds communicate with each other, misunderstandings as well as conflicts come up. China has become an active member of the world community, and her entry into the WTO, is bound to bring us into more contact with the outside world. At the same time, the English language has become the most wide spread medium of international communication. More and more Chinese people use English as their second language, even some Chinese students go abroad to further their education. The following is a report from a British magazine- The Economist (2003:3151): Chinese students are flooding into British universities. Seen from close to, Britain’s universities are in a sorry state: overcrowded, cash-strapped, and demoralized. But from far away they can look very attractive. Their marketing to foreign students is excellent, especially in China, where educating children abroad is increasingly fashionable. The latest firm fingers, from 2001, show around 18,000 Chinese students in British higher education. That makes then the largest group out of a total of 143,000 foreigners. And it is a 71% increase on 2000 preliminary figure for 2002 shows a further increase of 67%, taking the likely total over 25,000. Some questions will arise in one’s brains: Are they compatible with the western cultur