The Role of Schema in Constructing Cross-cultural Minds for Students in Local Universities

Abstract

Students studying and living in local universities find themselves failing in conducting fluent communication with people with different cultural backgrounds, due to the rare access to direct interactions with foreigners in person. Hence, to change that situation and help them construct cross-cultural minds is severely necessary. Abundant of achievements on cross-cultural communication have been reached, and a lot of rewards in the research have been granted to those studies analyzed, discussed and interpreted from the perspective of social-psychology, which can not propose an appropriate and efficient approach to constructing cross-cultural minds for students in the local universities. The studies from the perspective of cognitive process and more specifically the schema theory, however, can claim due attention to understand and construct the procedure of intercultural communication where multi-cultures are represented, processed and accommodated. This work is intended to address the issues of how students can efficiently obtain knowledge, how multicultural knowledge can be effectively acquired by students, and how beliefs can be shared and multicultural minds constructed finally.