Abstract and Key Words

Abstract: Body language is a means of nonverbal communication often found in communication of mankind. It is an important channel to express thoughts, attitudes and feelings of human beings. It is helpful to use and study body language in cross-cultural communication. This paper first introduces the basic information of body language, then compares the differences of body language between China and English-speaking countries and finally discusses the ways to use body language properly in cross-culture communication. It might be helpful to people to reduce or avoid misunderstanding due to cultural differences of body language in cross-cultural communication.

Key words: body language   cross-cultural communication    cultural difference

摘要：体态语是人类交际中最常见的一种非语言交际手段，是人们交流思想和感情的重要手段，是表达态度，感情的信息载体。研究和使用体态语有助于我们进行跨文化交际。本文介绍了体态语的基本信息，通过比较中西方体态语的差异并提出正确使用体态语的方法，可帮助人们减少或避免在跨文化交际中因体态语的文化差异而引起的误解。

关键词：体态语   跨文化交际    文化差异

1.    Introduction
In the real communication environment, people often communicate with each other through language. In addition, people can use many other ways to express ideas, feelings and transmitted information, which is called nonverbal communication. While in daily communication, body language, being one of the main forms of nonverbal communication, plays an important role.
Body language is a useful tool to exchange ideas and feelings. Birdwhistell had ever made estimation on the people who have the same culture and language behaviors and nonverbal language behaviors that were used when talking to others. The result showed that language communication had only taken 30% or so among the whole communicative behaviors. Samovar expressed firmly that majority of the study experts believed that among all the face to face communications only 35% or so of the information contents were all conveyed by nonverbal communicative behaviors. Studies of America also indicated that language only took 7% of the communicative behaviors, intonation and facial expressions transferred 93% of the information.. Therefore, both China and English-speaking countries have studied it for a long time, which can be dated back to the time when Darwin published his book The Relationship of the Behavior between Animals and Human Beings. In the early 1950s, Birdwhistell was the first person to present the theory of body language in The Introduction of Body Language and defined it as a subject in his body language study. There are many scholars, including Deng Yuanchang, Liu Runqing, Language and Culture, studying the body language in every aspect in communication. Chen Wangdao pointed that body language was one of the tools to exchange our thoughts in his book. During the past decades, many achievements have been made on it.